Jeffrey M. Jackson: Genealogy and Convalescence

G e n e a l o g y a n d Co nva l esc e n ce
JEF F REY M . J A CK S O N
Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories
Jeffrey M. Jackson
Nietzsche and
Suffered Social
Histories
Genealogy and Convalescence
Jeffrey M. Jackson
University of Houston–Downtown
Houston
TX, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-60152-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59299-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937463
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover Illustration: © johnwoodcock
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Nature America Inc.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
For Alli
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to Alli Antar—my best friend. Her uncompromis-

ing commitment to beauty, justice, and truth allows little rest for my lazy
sensibilities. Without her, who knows where I would now be.
I am grateful to Stefan Bird-Pollan for many years of conversation
about Adorno and other matters. I also want to thank other colleagues
and friends who did me the great honor of reading my first book or of
taking an interest in its argument: Tammis Thomas, David Ryden, Greg
Getz, Ed Hugetz, Mohsen Mobasher, Kristin Anderson, Camilo Garcia,
and Brad Rappaport. Thanks to Jason Winfree for the hospitality at CSU
Stanislaus. Norman Whitman provided feedback on the draft of parts of this
book. I am grateful to John Rocco for the inspiration through his tireless
leadership of roc4nbcure.org, and for discussions about future cover art.
If there is anything valuable in this or my other work, it was surely
shaped by the many great teachers that I have been fortunate to know,
especially—in alphabetical order—Rudolf Bernet, James Chastain, John
Compton, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Cynthia Hampton, Michael Hodges,
Gregg Horowitz, Girard Krebs, Ursula Lawson, Algis Mickunas, Jeffrey
Tlumak, David Wood, and Arthur Zucker.
I am the beneficiary of consistent support from amazing parents. And,
as it is sometimes the case that younger siblings take the benefits of hav-
ing older siblings for granted—oblivious to the lessons, examples, and
opportunities afforded by having someone around to show them how to
vii
viii Acknowledgements
live—I want to thank my older brother James for everything, including

that which I was too young to remember.
And, thanks to Eleanor, the naughtiest puppy in the world.
An earlier version of Chap. 1 was published as “Nietzsche on Cultural
Convalescence” in Subjectivity.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality 43
3 Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy

of the Subject 69
4 Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectic: Ascetic Ideal

and the Status Quo 107
5 Working-Through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object

Relations Psychoanalysis 143
Bibliography
179
Index
183
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory to interrogate the

ways in which Nietzsche’s work explores the suffered sociality of reflec-
tion. For Nietzsche, that which seems independent—or is symbolically
or metaphysically sanctified as independent—is the symptom of a more
fundamental socio-historically conditioned dependence. In other words,
Nietzsche interrogates the way in which social history produces sub-
jects that are allergic to their own socio-historical conditions of possibil-
ity, taking various forms of a symptomatic insistence on independence.
There is therefore a reflexivity between the reproduction of social crisis
and the reproduction of subjectivity, such that social critique must also
be a critique of the subjectivity which is socially reproduced and which
engages in that social critique. Adorno expresses a similar thought in
Negative Dialectics, where he writes: “Identity is the Ur-form of ideol-
ogy … the critique of ideology is not something peripheral … but philo-
sophically central: the critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.”1
One might say that there is a parallel in the conception of the dominant
form of subjectivity as identity-thinking in Adorno and as grounded
within the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche. For both thinkers, as will be dis-
cussed in Chap. 4, reflection on social crisis implies a need for the self-
critique of reflection that is a symptom of the suffered crisis it attempts
to conceptualize.
On this reading, for Nietzsche, thinking is a symptom of suffered,
social histories. New thinking is therefore symptomatic of new forms
of suffered socio-historical life. Consciousness and will are themselves
© The Author(s) 2017 1

J.M. Jackson, Nietzsche and Suffered Social Histories,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION
expressions of suffered, social histories and Nietzsche’s concepts of gene-

alogy and convalescence might be seen as characterizing the working-
through of our suffered social pasts as the condition of possibility of
overcoming that past and creating a new world. Instead of an appeal to
free will or other form of subjectivism—which express the reproduction
of the status quo—Nietzsche suggests that any overcoming must take a
path through the ordeals of breaking from the relational histories that
have left us fixated in our ressentiment. From this perspective, Nietzsche’s
philosophy is not anti-reflection, nor the assertion of some sort of direct
expression of the body or dynamism, but rather reflection avowing its
conditions and limits in its imbrication within suffered, social histories.
Put another way, the main thesis of the following discussion is that
Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy needs a concept like that of convales-
cence to be coherent. Genealogy is a form of thinking, but one in which
thinking encounters its condition of possibility and limit in suffered his-
tory. In other words, for Nietzsche, there is a primacy placed on socially
mediated suffering—not merely the reflection on that suffering, but also
the suffering of reflection—the conditioning and rupturing of that reflec-
tion by that suffering. This includes reflection on “the body,” “life,”
“nature,” and so on. Here then, emancipation, or however one conceives
of the salutary norm asserted by Nietzsche’s philosophy, would need to
be characterized as a mode of suffered life which includes reflection as
one of its moments—as in convalescence, for example—rather than as the
result of a spontaneous subjective action.
Convalescence is a concept for the subject’s negotiation of the objectiv-
ity which conditions and ruptures reflection. In illness, our objectivity has
primacy over our subjectivity. Our vulnerable bodies suffer as objects; our
ideas are undergirded, exceeded, and ruptured by this objectivity; thoughts,
goals, and desires are thwarted and interrupted, and we are forced to work-
through and adapt them to an embodiment that was taken for granted. Our
desire, concepts, and anticipations arise from and are destroyed by the objec-
tivity with which they can never catch up and can never freeze or fix. In this
sense, “objectivity” refers not merely to epistemological correspondence
with the object, but to that which exceeds, conditions, and ruptures ideas.
Objectivity is both reflected upon, and the suffered basis and limit of reflec-
tion. Genealogy does not simply interrogate history, but rather the non-
identical character of suffered relationality; genealogy is itself symptomatic
of that relationality; that is, it is symptomatic of that which it interrogates.
Nietzsche’s genealogical narrative is, as we will see, a kind of primal scene,
1 INTRODUCTION 3
both found and constructed, which depicts the socio-historical conditions of

reflection, and thereby holds the promise of coherent reflection: a reflection
which is mediated by suffered social history. The use of these specific con-
cepts is analyzed in subsequent chapters, but they also characterize a broader
approach to other portions of Nietzsche’s aphoristic work.
The following discussion begins by suggesting an interpretation
of Nietzsche, along with Marx and Freud, with whom he is frequently
grouped, as analyses of the reproduction of purportedly independent
subjects by suffered social histories. Drawing on aspects of psychoa-
nalysis which demonstrate the negativity of social history—in loss and
trauma, for example—Nietzsche’s provocative concepts of convalescence
and genealogy are explored as ways to negotiate this negativity. This can
specifically be seen in Nietzsche’s insistence that history entails suffer-
ing that can never be redeemed—suffering that exceeds the identifica-
tion and equivalence symptomatically projected upon it by the socially
conditioned subject. Convalescence and genealogy represent the work of
negotiating this excessive negativity and therefore provide a path toward
socio-cultural transformation in the midst of a seemingly ineradicable
domination. In Chap. 4, this is linked to Theodor Adorno’s negative
dialectics and his thinking of subject and object. Adorno’s underappre-
ciated philosophical position was formulated in contrast with prevailing
trends in philosophy—primarily phenomenology and existentialism—and
therefore provides a fertile ground from which to interrogate the work
of Nietzsche, which is so often interpreted through phenomenology and
existentialism. Nietzsche, it is argued, can be said to have a certain nega-
tive dialectics of which his provisional, fragmentary, self-consciously per-
spectival philosophy is symptomatic.
Also, a comparison is made between the psychoanalytic problem of
splitting and Nietzsche’s critique of dichotomous moral values—paradig-
matically between Good and Evil. In Melanie Klein’s analysis of “partial
objects,” the infant sometimes sees the caregiver as a good object and
other times as a bad object, which is indicative of the paranoid–schizoid
position. In Chap. 5, Nietzsche’s critique of morality is analyzed through
this lens, and through the perspective of D.W. Winnicott; a parallel is
suggested between, on one hand, Nietzsche’s valorization of the integra-
tion of lived moments into a whole (in his account of Eternal Return,
for example), and, on the other, Klein’s description of the infant coming
to see the good and bad objects as the same object and various aspects
of Winnicott’s analyses of the transitional character of the facilitating
4 1 INTRODUCTION
environment. For all three, the integration of subjectivity with its envi-
ronment is not a seamless unity, but rather an integration with the object
that constitutively eludes integration.
Nietzsche’s main concepts have relatives in Winnicott’s transitional
phenomena and Klein’s concept of the transition from the paranoid–
schizoid position to the depressive position. Nietzsche’s thinking is proto-
psychoanalytic, but not in the sense that he is a mere precursor who was
surpassed by psychoanalytic concepts. As in object relations psychology,
he insists on the suffered, embodied, relational origins of human sub-
jectivity—particularly its dominant forms which assume forms of ani-
mistic subjectivism. Moreover, reading Nietzsche in a certain way allows
an extension to adulthood and to culture of that relationally mediated
ordeal which Winnicott and Klein describe as typical of infantile develop-
ment and the facilitating environment. This also implies a way to read
the commonality between Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Their theories
interrogate the social histories of theorizing and moral subjectivity, which
is symptomatic of a troubled relationality within which that subjectivity
is not master. As this troubled relationality is mediated by concrete and
symbolic social arrangements, the critique of the subject implies a cri-
tique of those arrangements.
Social theory typically proceeds by the assertion of some sort of ontol-
ogy of human being and then describes social relations through this lens.
In this sense, Nietzsche might not be seen as having a social theory. For
Nietzsche, there is no social contract or foundational idea of reason or
spirit, human nature, morality, rights, duties, free will, etc. However, this
apparent lack of a traditional social theory is properly understood as a
more fundamental critique of the starting point of such theories in reflec-
tion. For Nietzsche, reflection cannot be an unbiased starting point for
theorizing sociality, because it is itself a symptom of sociality. At the same
time, there is no way around reflection, as if one could directly articu-
late the pure body, being, or existence in some sort of embodied meta-
phor, transgression, direct experience, revelation, clearing, event, etc.
Nietzsche’s social theory would then be implicit in his model of reflec-
tion: Biased reflection reflects on its own suffered, socio-historical condi-
tions. However, those conditions are not merely given, capable of being
described through a positivistic social science, nor are they simply the
causes of reflection. Rather, they are suffered or undergone in a way that
exceeds or ruptures reflection. Nietzschean reflection is symptomatic of
the situated vulnerability to that which exceeds reflection.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Consequently, one might say that reflection takes one of two para-
digmatic forms—often subtly intermingled—that are symptomatic of
this encounter with this excess. On the one hand, reflection may take
the form of a reactive, defense mechanism—which Nietzsche designates
in a variety of ways as ressentiment, slave morality, or ascetic ideal—find-
ing truth in what is familiar, simplified, ahistorical, and socially shared.
On the other hand, genealogy or convalescence signifies a form of reflec-
tion that may be able to negotiate its suffered basis in an encounter with
what is strange, singular, and infused with the negative. For Nietzsche,
truth might be said to be a function of whether or not one can bear and
negotiate this negativity—either a magical system or a negative dialectic.
Furthermore, this affectivity of which truth is a symptom is socio-histor-
ically reproduced. On the one hand, truth is an expression of affective
social-histories, but on the other hand, truth reproduces those affective
social conditions.
Nietzsche can thereby be read as contributing to a critical social the-
ory. He does this not only by interrogating the imbrication between
reflection and embodiment, but by insisting on the primacy of suffered
vulnerability in the socio-historically mediated negotiation of that imbri-
cated complexity. This suffered element exceeds and overwhelms reflec-
tion which takes the form of a symptom. One might say that this socially
conditioned suffering undergirds, conditions, and ruptures reflection,
such that coherent reflection would seek its own conditions of possibil-
ity within vulnerability. Consequently, reflection’s interrogation of itself
leads back to a suffered need to transform the social conditions which
condition and rupture that reflection.
In this way, Nietzsche contributes to the sketching out of the condi-
tions of possibility of transforming the society which conditions reflec-
tion. His critique of idealism is an attempt to account for the process of
working ourselves out of our pasts and thereby create the conditions for
a better future. Reflection’s genealogical critique of itself shows that it is
conditioned by suffered, social histories and therefore implies the need
of transforming the conditions which reproduce those histories. In other
words, reason’s critique of itself does not merely imply a need to think
differently, but rather a need for new social conditions which would
facilitate convalescence. That critique reveals that reflection lies within a
pre-subjective, socio-historically conditioned crossroads between ressen-
timent and convalescence. These crossroads, however, cannot be navi-
gated merely subjectively, as the result of a choice or of virtue or ethical
6 1 INTRODUCTION
reasoning—rather its navigation takes the form of convalescence, a suf-

fered ordeal. Ressentiment is the fixed inability to navigate the crossroads,
to bear the work and loss involved; convalescence is the navigation.
One might say that all of Nietzsche’s prominent terms—genealogy,
convalescence, Will to Power, the herd, eternal recurrence—have a suf-
fered, social dimensionality; this is to say that they are attempts to cap-
ture the scenes within which we live as embodied relational beings.
Rather than moving from a metaphysics to sociality, the implication is
that one should read Nietzsche’s “metaphysical” concepts as expressions
of sociality from the beginning. If our concepts—sick and healthy—are
expressions of our social histories, the locus of emancipation is in the
concrete organization of society which conditions the embodied beings
who reflect. On this reading of Nietzsche, sociality—if not traditional
social theory—is primary. Our ancestors’ suffered, social needs produced
slave morality, ressentiment, metaphysics, and animistic conceptions of
subjectivity and language. The lies, errors, and fairytales identified by
Nietzsche throughout his work are expressions of this ancient but utterly
contemporary need; any disruption of these lies and errors would only
be possible by way of a shift in this suffered, social history. The need for
lies or errors is another way to describe the pre-subjective recalcitrance of
partiality that conditions awareness and our pursuit of the good.
Nietzsche’s genealogical reflection would not merely aim to disclose
natural or immoral bases of behavior, but rather to show the more or less
overwhelming, excessive, suffered, socio-historical context of that behav-
ior: the symptomatic, defensive, unconscious sociality that gives rise to
moral and epistemic subjectivity as a symptom. He occasionally appeals
to instincts, will to power, and so on, not as causes, but rather as place-
holders for that excessive socio-historical embodiedness, which he evokes
to displace all positing of animistic causes. Importantly, those displace-
ments are themselves symptoms of that embodiedness, such that the cri-
tiques of errors, lies, and morality all point toward a negotiation with
that excessive history, as do the errors, lies, and morality themselves. But,
this exposure to excessive history indicates our objective sociality, i.e.,
our embodied, suffered, libidinal togetherness, rather than some sort of
subjective concern with being, difference or dynamism. This is an inver-
sion of the dominant form of philosophy which places a primacy on the
subject, as a spontaneous source of action—an inversion at the heart of
what Nietzsche calls his reevaluation of values.
ERRORS, LIES, AND THE SUFFERED SOCIAL HISTORIES OF SUBJECTIVITY 7
On this reading, Nietzsche would primarily be concerned with the suf-

fered negotiation of the possibility of breaking from a troubled past and
transforming the future. To believe that there could be a “clearing,” or
that we could attain an “ontology” of a human being, would be an expres-
sion of the ascetic ideal. Similarly, the critical reading of Nietzsche as offer-
ing an account of the natural histories of morality which could thereby
disrupt our value systems turns Nietzsche’s thought into a privileging of a
subject capable of understanding such natural histories. Instead, Nietzsche
posits an interminable working-through of the ascetic ideal, which
emerged and is reproduced as a defense mechanism against the excessive
and abject—not merely naturalistic—character of our social histories.
Errors, Lies, and the Suffered Social Histories

of Subjectivity
Genealogy could be said to refer to more than simply the text titled
“On the Genealogy of Morality.” Nietzsche’s thinking in general often
takes the form of genealogies of subjectivity via interrogations of moral-
ity, reflection, free will, truth, and experience. Such thinking does not
amount to merely naturalistic, causal accounts of subjectivity, but rather
provides accounts of the suffered social origins of subjectivity. As an ini-
tial account of Nietzsche’s varied genealogies of the subject, this section
considers several moments in Nietzsche’s texts, which gesture in differ-
ent ways toward the primacy of suffered social histories. Bringing these
three terms together—suffering, sociality, and history—implies their
imbrication, i.e., the way in which each is entangled with the other.
Nietzsche’s aphoristic style is often expressive of the impossibility of ade-
quately describing and knowing that imbrication; sometimes Nietzsche
addresses the histories or socialities of suffering, other times he empha-
sizes the suffered character of sociality and history.
Throughout his work, Nietzsche refers to the dominant form of sub-
jectivity and associated concepts—free will, intellect, morality, virtue,
etc.—as lies, errors, or fairytales. On the surface, such accounts seem to
maintain at least a trace of a cognitive subject which could be incorrect
or deceived and therefore could have access to truth. At the same time,
the truths disclosed within Nietzsche’s critiques not only unfailingly
exceed any notions of such a subject or truth as identity, but rather con-
dition and rupture such notions. They point to a suffered embodiedness
8 1 INTRODUCTION
from which any truth or error—i.e., any subjectivity—would arise. Lies,

errors, and fairytales are then not merely the result of faulty beliefs, but
rather the expression of historically conditioned need.2
On the Genealogy of Morality traces the social histories of subjectiv-
ity, which arises from slavery and enforced requirements of living within
mass society. In a remarkable passage from the third essay of that text,
Nietzsche clarifies the suffered, historical embodiedness of subjectivity,
and the possibility of its coming to a different form of awareness or epis-
temic “objectivity.” Although sociality is not mentioned explicitly in this
passage, it is implicit, as will be discussed below and in subsequent chap-
ters. He writes:
to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small

discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future ‘objectivity’—the
latter understood not as ‘contemplation without interest’ (which is, as
such, a non-concept and an absurdity), but as having in our power the abil-
ity to engage and disengage our ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ [das Vermögen, sein Für
und Wider in der Gewaltzuhaben und aus- und einzuhängen]: we can use
the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge…
let us be wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up
a ‘pure, will-less, painless [schmerzlos], timeless, subject of knowledge’, let
us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’,
‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge as such’…there is only a perspectival see-
ing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into
words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for
the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our
‘objectivity’. But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emo-
tions without exception, assuming we could: well? Would that not mean to
castrate the intellect?3
There are two key points to focus on here. First, the list of qualifiers that
undergird the fairytale account of the subject implicitly suggest that sub-
jectivity is itself the effect of a complex imbrication of embodied, suf-
fered histories: an impure, suffered, temporal, affective, will-driven
imbrication. Will here, of course, is not a reference to a spontaneous
source of action, as in “freedom of the will,” but rather to something
closer to an unconscious drive that is socio-historically conditioned.
Elsewhere, Nietzsche describes the will as the expression of a more basic
relation between a plurality of embodied, physiological forces.4 The fact
that the will is imbricated with time and suffering suggests that this is
not simply a tracing of subjectivity back to the body, will to power, or

other more basic thing, but rather to the situatedness of that body and
will within a more complex field of suffered history. This imbrication
would not be reducible to some sort of abstractly conceived difference or
non-identity, but is rather expressive of suffered history.
To put this differently, Nietzsche is pointing to the excessive char-
acter of suffered history as the scene or constellation from which sub-
jectivity arises. This excessive character of history reflects a vulnerability
implicit within the experience that is more appropriately associated with
the potential for trauma in the psychoanalytic sense than it is with natu-
ralism, ontologies of forces, or the critique of the metaphysics of pres-
ence, for example. In psychoanalysis, trauma signifies that element within
concrete social experience which imposes itself on and ruptures our sub-
jectivity in such a way that cannot be practically negotiated; it thereby
marks a breach of the idea and will by the suffered excess from which
subjectivity arises. Although Nietzsche does not use the term “trauma,”
he nonetheless focuses on aspects of our suffered social histories that
are more or less traumatic—the potential for the Dionysian to become
a “witches brew,” the unbearable loss of God as the foundation of all
meaning, the abject experience of slavery, the ordeal of living outside
of the herd's fetishizing of nihilism, the imposition of the straightjacket
of socialization, the loss of the form of life of our nomadic ancestors to
roam freely, etc. Many of the figures analyzed and created by Nietzsche
are described within such excessive scenes. Schopenhauer, Luther,
Stendhal, Kant, Socrates, the lyric poet, the free spirit, the slave, the mas-
ter, the ascetic priest, Zarathustra et al. might be seen as taking their sig-
nificance within Nietzsche’s texts as figures who suffered this imbrication
in varying ways. In some cases, in some ways, under certain conditions,
they were unable to bear this imbrication and thus embody varying posi-
tions symptomatic of ressentiment. In other cases, in other ways, they
were able to bear and negotiate that imbrication and thereby convalesce
from their internalization of dominant cultures of ressentiment.
Second, Nietzsche’s conception of epistemological objectivity as having
the ability to engage and disengage our valuing perspectives implies the
primacy of this imbricated complexity, from which such an ability or the
lack of such an ability would arise. In other words, genealogy does not
reveal a naturalistic origin or state of affairs or a faith in metaphysics, but
rather a suffered socio-historical scene where the type and level of attach-
ment to, or fixation of, our values—at the heart of our subjectivity—is
10 1 INTRODUCTION
forged. Nietzsche provides a model of reflection which comes to itself

within the suffered histories which condition that reflection. As men-
tioned, although sociality is not explicitly included in this list of quali-
fiers: impure, suffering, will-driven, and temporal—it is implicit. The
passage itself comes from On the Genealogy of Morality—to be discussed
in more detail in Chaps. 3 and 4—which traces the social histories of the
subject. Moreover, throughout Nietzsche’s aphoristic work, in passages
that similarly articulate genealogies of the subject, sociality is empha-
sized in its entanglement with suffering, time, will, and emotion. This
is, again, the sense of the reference in this book’s title to “suffered, social
histories”—to capture the imbrication of suffered embodiedness, tempo-
rality, and sociality.
As will be discussed in Chap. 4, Nietzsche associates this concept of
a “pure” subjectivity with the ascetic ideal. This contradictory ascetic
subject feigns denial of that which cannot be denied, hates that which
reproduces it. The tentacles of this ideal extend into the contemporary
fetishizing of subjectivity with a bad conscience; such subjectivity val-
orizes its own activity—its own suspicion, questioning, writing, trans-
gressing, fleeing, waiting, choosing, etc.—which would in certain ways
magically break free from the excessive imbrication of which its activity
is symptomatic, because in certain ways it cannot bear or negotiate that
imbrication. It thereby threatens a separation from that which is insepa-
rable.
In Adornian terms, one might say that Nietzsche’s perspectivalism is
indicative of the primacy of the object (Vorrang des Objekts), rather than
the primacy of the subject. It is not a mode of subjectivity endowed
with a spontaneous power that celebrates plurality and eschews belief
in identity or transcendence, but rather it is a socio-historically conditi
oned ability to move through positions of suffered embodiment and in
so doing engage and disengage our pros and cons. Subjective perspec-
tives are expressions of suffered embodied situatedness. As will be dis-
cussed in Chap. 5, this can also be described through Melanie Klein’s
notion of the depressive position, in which the infant that is facilitated by
a good environment would be able to negotiate the loss of the partuality
of its position. Perspectivalism implies the ability to bear the momentary,
situated character of subjectivity and its inevitable transgression, rup-
ture, and loss within a negotiated, socio-historical time and place. One
might say that this is reflection’s avowal of embodied relationality, of that
complex imbrication of social-histories, without a bad conscience—the
product of convalescence from ressentiment, the product of the genea-

logical working-through of that more or less traumatic social history.
In the unpublished fragment, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral
Sense,” Nietzsche suggests that the intellect (das Erkennen) is “an aid
supplied to the most unfortunate, most delicate and most transient of
beings so as to detain them for a minute within existence.”5 At the same
time, this mechanism of survival is coimplicated with socially shared
and fetishized deception. The non-moral (aussermoralisch) character of
deception and truth implies a critique of the primacy of a freely will-
ing, cognitive subject by interrogating the suffered social history of that
subject. The delusion of the primacy of cognition is a symptom of the
affectivity of a weak and pitiful species, contending with each other and
nature to survive. That affectivity takes the form of a delusional narcis-
sism.6 Nietzsche writes:
This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in humankind, where deception,

flattery, lying and cheating, speaking behind the backs of others, keep-
ing up appearances, living in borrowed finery, wearing masks, the dra-
pery of convention, play-acting for the benefit of others and oneself…
What do human beings really know about themselves?…Does nature not
remain silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing
and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the
twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the
complicated tremblings of the nerve-fibres?…woe betide fateful curiosity
should it ever succeed in peering through a crack in the chamber of con-
sciousness, out and down into the depth, and thus gain an intimation of
the fact that humanity…rests on the pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the
murderous—clinging in dreams, as it were, to the back of a tiger.7
Here, Nietzsche seems to emphasize natural history, as if nature pro-

duced these weak deluded creatures. However, implicit in this account
is the suffered, social history of these creatures and the social function
of this non-moral lying. In order to deal with each other, our ances-
tors developed intellect for concealment and dissimulation. In order
to survive socially—prior to any social contract—language emerged
as an instantiation of this obligatory form of shared deception: “a way
of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force
everywhere, and the legislation of language also produces the first laws
of truth, for the contrast between truth and lying comes into existence
here for the first time…”.8 The conceptual contrast between truth and
12 1 INTRODUCTION
falsity that grounds cognition presupposes the existence of language—

an obligatory, fixed, structure of signs. This structure operates like a
defense mechanism, originating out of a suffered need to conform, to
exist socially. At the same time, the shared system of signs enables the
obfuscation of our suffered, historical embodiment by providing a web
of distorted simplifications which makes the intellect possible.
In effect, the intellect is an internalization of the status quo. Nietzsche
insists that what is primary is not truth or falsity—and the form of sub-
jectivity this assumes—but rather the pleasure and consequences pro-
duced by truth and falsity:
Human beings do not so much flee from being tricked as from being
harmed by being tricked…they do not hate deception but rather the dam-
aging, inimical consequences of certain species of deception…They desire
the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; they are indifferent
to pure knowledge if it has no consequences, but they are actually hostile
towards truths which may be harmful and destructive….9
Truth in this sense serves the function of ameliorating suffering, of facili-

tating a shared social defense mechanism against a more or less traumatic
experience of history. For Nietzsche, language is not primarily a medium
through which we understand truth as a real state of affairs, but rather
a medium of socialization. There are suffered social conditions for any-
thing like “truth” to emerge, and those conditions continue to shape
that truth. To put it another way, the subject which would understand
truth is itself a sort of a symptom of a more primary social history, a
history which is ongoing. This history is mediated by conformity to a
system of shared signifiers—sounds, marks, etc.—and concepts that are
socio-historically reproduced, endowed with fetishized value.
The sociality implicit in the form of the signifier grounds the social-
ity implicit in the concept; in other words, the shared, simplified, obliga-
tory character of the signifier grounds the representational function of
the concept:
…each word immediately becomes a concept, not by virtue of the fact that
it is intended to serve as a memory of a unique, utterly individualized, pri-
mary experience to which it owes its existence, but because at the same
time it must fit countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e., cases which,
strictly speaking, are never equivalent…Every concept comes into being by
making equivalent that which is non-equivalent.10
Nietzsche suggests that the dominant function of language is not to

communicate the singular or non-identical, but rather to reduce the sin-
gular and unique to the common or identical. This function arises from
the primacy of a suffered, social history in which our ancestors needed
or were obliged to conform within a mass context. The fetishized mark
which signals equivalence is paralleled by a concept, the internalized
remnant of the signifier, which is then a distorted symptom of its suf-
fered social origins.
He writes:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropo-

morphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected
to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and
which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly
established, canonical, and binding…the obligation to use the customary
metaphors, or, to put it in moral terms, the obligation to lie in accord-
ance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is
binding for all…they lie unconsciously…in accordance with centuries-old
habits—and precisely because of this unconsciousness…they arrive at the feel-
ing of truth.11
This “feeling of truth” that is so fundamental to the contemporary

form of subjectivity is the product of a long history of human relations
in which socially shared, obligatory tropes are internalized and become
seemingly natural. As such, alternatives are bound to seem strange and
untenable and may seem dangerous to the group. More importantly,
these obligatory tropes serve to defend against reflection taking account
of its own unbearable history: “humanity … rests on the pitiless, the
greedy, the insatiable, the murderous—clinging in dreams, as it were, to
the back of a tiger.”
Section 354 of The Gay Science deals with a similar question:
To what end does consciousness exist at all when it is basically superfluous?

… where need and distress [das Bedürfniss, die Noth] have for a long time
forced people to communicate, to understand each other swiftly and sub-
tly, there finally exists a surplus of this power and art of expression, a fac-
ulty, so to speak, which has slowly accumulated and now waits for an heir
… consciousness in general has developed only under the pressure of the need to
communicate … Consciousness is really just a net connecting one person
to another—only in this capacity did it have to develop; the solitary and
14 1 INTRODUCTION
predatory person would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts,
feelings, and movements—at least some of them—even enter into con-
sciousness is the result of a terrible ‘must’ which has ruled over man for a
long time…he needed help and protection, he needed his equals…12
Language as herd-signal, as a gesture, enables commonality as a basis

for communication and enables survival by operating as a sort of fet-
ish. The word or phrase, as signifiers, expresses that shared sociality in
the form of the written mark or spoken sound; the accent or shared dia-
lect signals familiarity and sameness to others within the same group.13
Nietzsche suggests that consciousness is a distorted symptom of the need
for language to produce conformity, stability, a herd. Its self-confidence
and purported independence are in effect the naturalization of the status
quo, which is the expression of need-driven conformity.
One of Nietzsche’s main challenges, then, is to conceive of the disrup-
tion of this history, without appealing to the magical, animistic power
of a subject that can supposedly think differently, act morally, or other-
wise spontaneously escape from the weight of history. Nietzsche symbol-
izes this alternative in a variety of ways throughout his work—through,
for example, the position of the lyric poet, free spirit, or Zarathustra’s
image of man as a bridge and the associated concepts of overcoming
and undergoing. More important, however, are his fragmentary, quasi-
phenomenological descriptions of the suffered ordeal of working oneself
out of fixated socio-historical position. The latter is brilliantly captured
by Nietzsche’s deployment of the concept of convalescence in his later
work, which is the focus of Chap. 2. One cannot critique conscious-
ness through a strong, brave, reticent, or resolute subjectivity, but rather
through a convalescent working-through of one’s affective need for the
herd. As we will see, the convalescent slowly bears the irreducible sin-
gularity of her body which heals and expresses itself outside of obliga-
tory cultural signs, concretely enduring the disruption of fixated concept,
word, and caste.14 It thereby disrupts the naturalization of the status
quo, calcified within the purportedly independent subject.
When Nietzsche says that consciousness is social, he obviously does
not simply mean that freedom lies in solitude, that sociality is constitu-
tively repressive. Rather, the emphasis is on the constitutive sociality of
consciousness; in other words, it implies that the fairytale of separation is
the symptom of an unbearable inability to separate. As Nietzsche suggests
in On the Genealogy of Morality, recreating the freedom experienced by
the prehistoric, nomadic predator is not possible because human subjec-

tivity is constituted by the victory of slaves’ morality and the traumatic
rupture of our instincts brought about by the loss of this prehistoric past.
In fact, it is the distorted desire to accomplish the impossibility of return-
ing or spontaneously transgressing this history that constitutes the mod-
ern psyche, insofar as it is this legacy.
The assertion of the sociality of consciousness is more properly the
assertion of the primacy of that sociality in its imbrication with suffered
need and distress. The working-through of the loss of our nomadic past
is also the coming to the capacity to bear and negotiate our ineluctable
sociality without a bad conscience—the coming to bear the imbrication
of that sociality with the upsurge and variation of desire, in the shifting
relational context of pain and pleasure. Although, for Nietzsche, we are
constituted by these suffered social histories, alternative forms of social-
ity are possible, in which we as singularities would take up our social-
ity and work-through our socialization, without blaming and shaming.
There is no Nietzschean “social theory” as such, because the current
form is so dominant, any alternative would seem radically speculative;
moreover, any vision of liberation risks expressing the ressentiment it
would aim to overcome, by projecting an essence, a utopia. The most
coherent approach would be to speak within the suffering of the con-
valescent, for whom fantasy and ideals meet their limit in suffering.
Here, the ideal would be that which nurtures and shelters that suffered
ordeal, in contrast to the consolation or maniacal escape from the anxi-
ety offered by the ascetic priest. In this sense, coherent reflection implies
an imperative to create a world for the convalescent with the time and
place to convalesce, to heal, to work-through, and to slowly come to
bear its objectivity.
The section from Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a
Hammer titled “The Four Great Errors,” echoes these genealogical
themes.15 The term “errors” (Irrthümer), like “lies” (Lüge) in the early
essay, is not meant in the usual sense, as if there were a free-willing cog-
nitive subject who made a mistake, a misjudgment. Both errors and lies
point toward Nietzsche’s conception of the pre-subjective unconscious,
what might be called the subject’s suffered, socio-historical conditions of
possibility. These “errors” are symptoms of need for the familiar that is
inherited, readymade within the relational and social environment within
which subjects are formed. This contains a productive contradiction,
insofar as it suggests that there can be an error without a subject who can
16 1 INTRODUCTION
be correct. In effect, the truth that genealogical reflection interrogates

exceeds a positive state of affairs, a naturalistically conceived humanity,
and a historical array of facts and events. Rather, it points to an imbri-
cation of socio-historically conditioned suffered embodiedness, which is
ineluctably infused with the negative that conditions and ruptures reflec-
tion. These four interconnected “errors” point toward defenses against
that negativity, through socially shared simplifications, including magical
beliefs in the subject’s conquering of history.
Nietzsche identifies errors of “confusing cause and effect,” “false cau-
sation,” “imaginary causes,” and “free will.” For example, the “error of
confusing cause and effect,” “the genuine destruction of reason … can
be found in the oldest and newest habits of humanity: we even sanctify
it and call it ‘religion’ and ‘morality’.”16 Nietzsche uses the example of
a popular book that recommends a meager diet to promote “a long and
happy—and virtuous—life.” Nietzsche points out that the diet is not
the “cause” of anything, but rather the symptom of more complicated
physiological conditions. A simple cause, a source of spontaneous anima-
tion that is familiar, is posited as magically overriding the complexity of
historical materiality. One might extend this as applying to commodity
fetishism and contemporary marketing of diets, gadgets, self-help books,
and more broadly to the floating nature of this magical element, which
both promises amelioration of suffering and offers a node of social cohe-
sion. Nietzsche writes: “The most general formula at the centre of all
religions and moralities is: ‘do this, don’t do that—and then you’ll be
happy! Otherwise…’. Every morality, every religion, is this imperative,
–I call it the great original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. In my
mouth, this formula changes into its opposite…”.17 The error thus pro-
vides a sort of two-track release from the ordeal of negotiating excessive
objectivity. On the one hand, it provides a magical fantasy which would
endow one with power, so that one can avoid vulnerability to other
objects. On the other hand, as a fetish, it offers the libidinal payoff of
enabling social cohesion among those with whom the magical fantasy is
shared.
In “On Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche critiqued the supposed naturalness
of words and concepts as shared and obligatory simplifications arising
from needs to conform and obfuscate the excessive character of social
history. This can be extended into a critique of the subject as conceptual-
ized through shared and obligatory simplifications as a causal agent that
can be held responsible and choose right from wrong. For Nietzsche,
causality is a consolation for the unbearable fact that we are the prod-
ucts of an irreducible complexity of imbricated factors entailing exposure
to the strange and unfamiliar. As will be discussed in Chap. 3, in On the
Genealogy of Morality, this is described as a sensibility descending from
the dominated, obliterated life of slaves for whom the unfolding of exist-
ence in the negotiation and exploration of things was either impossible
or unbearable, giving rise to mass forms of dissociation. He writes:
Familiarizing something unfamiliar is comforting, reassuring, satisfying,

and produces a feeling of power as well. Unfamiliar things are dangerous,
anxiety-provoking, upsetting, –the primary instinct is to get rid of these
painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since it
is basically a matter of wanting to get rid of unpleasant thoughts, people
are not exactly particular about how to do it: the first idea that can famil-
iarize the unfamiliar feels good enough to be ‘considered true’…the causal
instinct is conditioned and excited by feelings of fear. Whenever possible,
the question ‘why?’ won’t point to the cause as such, but instead will point
to a particular type of cause—a reassuring comforting cause. The first con-
sequence of this need is that causation gets attributed to something we are
already familiar with, something we have already encountered and regis-
tered in memory. This forecloses the possibility that anything novel, alien,
or previously unencountered can be a cause…Result: a certain type of
causal attribution becomes increasingly prevalent, gets concentrated into a
system, and finally emerges as dominant, which is to say it completely rules
out other causes and explanations…18
These errors are symptomatic of dependence on others through which

they conjure up the magical power the readymade, familiar simplifica-
tions. This enables conformity, and a sort of libidinally charged group
mobilization, albeit a mobilization bought by a nihilistic dissocia-
tion from temporalization and spatialization in a constructed world of
“responsibility.”
As a point of contrast with our view, one might consider Eric
Blondel’s remarkable account of Nietzsche on the body and culture.19
Blondel recognizes Nietzsche’s fundamental concern with embodiment
and culture, but his emphasis on metaphor abstracts from the body’s
imbrication within suffered social histories: “Nietzsche’s speculations
have the particular quality … of being useful only to the extent that
they are self-effacing when they finally come face to face with a body,
an individual, a being, and existence, in short, Life. Therefore, reducing
18 1 INTRODUCTION
Nietzsche’s thought to that of the play of signifiers, means forgetting

that genealogy insistently reminds us of the bodily and vital ground from
which all discourse speaks…”.20 One might read this as asserting a bod-
ily basis of deconstruction, which would not just be a play of signifiers
but the body speaking through signification. This is a remarkable char-
acterization of the embodied basis of language, but on our reading, it
does not go far enough. Whereas Blondel’s Nietzsche valorizes a “liv-
ing thinking” in metaphors that captures a plurality of perspectives, on
our interpretation, Nietzsche valorizes the embodied, suffered undergo-
ing of our relational objectivity which works on our concepts—under-
girding, conditioning, and rupturing them. Blondel’s description of
Nietzschean metaphor as properly capturing an excessive, inexhaustible,
ungrounded “life” is an abstraction from the suffered social scenes which
forge our abilities or inabilities to bear and negotiate our objectivity. As
will be suggested in Chap. 5, this aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking might
be approached through Winnicott’s notion of the transitional space of
negotiating external and internal objectivity which undergirds and rup-
tures subjectivity and its concepts.
For Nietzsche, the body is socio-historically mediated through its suf-
fering, which governs both the repression of the fragmentary through
which the body speaks and the ability to bear and work-through that
repression. We do not, as Blondel suggests, forget the body, but undergo
the bodily need in a particular way. The interpretation can only become
self-effacing before life and acknowledge its primacy if it can bear it,
because the interpretation itself is conditioned by a life that is suffered
socially and historically in a way that gives rise to, and ruptures, interpre-
tations. Blondel writes:
Our hypothesis is that Nietzsche’s text, as a textual and bodily labour and
movement has the job of signifying the Ja-sagen (and not the Versagen)
that makes the body speak as grand reason: through the over determina-
tion of its central signs (genealogy, Übermensch, Will to Power, etc.), but its
metaphorical movement and rhetorical procedures, which are those used
by the play of drives: inverted commas, Sperrdruck, dots, dashes, anacolu-
thons, the world of aphorisms, alternating texts with blanks, the continual
emergence of the body. The body becomes a text: Nietzsche’s text is as
much a practice as thinking.21
This appeal to “life” and “body” abstracts from suffered sociality. The
body is not a thing, a plurality, or the Ur-form of non-identity. Rather,
it is always situated within relational, suffered historical scenes that are

more or less bearable. That social mediation of the suffered body would
account for the difference between any sort of emancipatory writing of
the body and writing as an expression of ressentiment, consolation, or
maniacal release. Blondel valorizes the possibility of a new Nietzschean
culture of the body, but in so doing occludes the problem of sociality at
the heart of the encounter with the object. On our reading, Nietzsche’s
central point is not the labor of the text, but coming to an ability to
bear the end of socially reinforced diversions—in the form of metaphys-
ics, consolations, and the tentacles of the fetishized ascetic ideal. Appeals
to “body” or “life” abstract from that suffered, socially mediated imbri-
cation in which the ability or inability to negotiate, to engage, and to
disengage our perspectives without fixated defense, is facilitated or
thwarted. There is a suffered, social history of body and life.22
On our reading, the primary Nietzschean task is not reading or
writing, but rather creating a culture which facilitates convalescence,
the ability to negotiate our embodiedness. Bodies always speak for
Nietzsche—the herd, the consoled, the ascetic, the sick, the noble,
et al. are speaking bodies! Blondel seems to suggest that metaphor is the
labor of letting the body speak, which would then subvert idiosyncratic
culture by implying perspectivism and finitude, and therefore plural-
ism.23 Metaphor is therefore a “yes-saying” to “life,” and presumably,
within cultures and discourse (including metaphysical systems), life and
the body do not “speak,” which seems to imply that metaphor magi-
cally subverts the historical reproduction of the lies, errors, and fair-
ytales discussed above. Such animism does not account for the social
history—concrete and symbolic—that fixates us within language, and it
consequently occludes the suffered, affective ordeal of being metaphori-
cal within a culture which militates against it. Moreover, it occludes the
unwitting metaphoricity implicit in the purported pure subject. Might
one not read Nietzsche as finding the transcendental subject to be an
elaborate metaphor for xenophobia?
For Blondel,
The body is thus that part of the world through which the world is revealed
to be something other than what it is. The body is living in so far as it is the
place in which different perspectives confront one another. Metaphor is the
mode in which a living passage from one perspective to another take place.
But the body itself: (1) can only be designated metaphorically; (2) acts as a
20 1 INTRODUCTION
metaphor for the metaphorical interpretation that the body is said to estab-
lish…The body is, as a location for perspectives that is always singular, the
place where the text is joined to its other outside of discourse and the place
where it is pluralized metaphorically. The body…is thus the principle of the
imaginary transcendence of the world.24
On the one hand, if metaphor is “the mode in which a living passage

from one perspective to another take place,” it would depend on scenes
within which historically conditioned abilities to engage and disengage
those perspectives are shaped. The use of metaphor is conditioned by an
embodied social history. On the other hand, though, is it not Nietzsche’s
view that all language—that of the subject, of “free will,” of morality,
of truth—is metaphorical, such that certain metaphors get fixated and
become obligatory?
For Blondel, metaphor is idealistically characterized as something
through which the world is “revealed” to be other, where we pass from
one perspective to another: “For the interpreter of culture, the world,
which is a blossoming of images, glides along on endless metaphorical
correspondences: for the imaginary, finitude, with its own inner perspec-
tivist singularity, is infinite, since it is its own metaphor. Nietzsche’s meta-
phors of the body and of interpretation … put forward the reality of the
world and culture as an open game of metaphor.”25 On our reading, “the
body”—if we can even speak of the body as a “thing” with traits, albeit
metaphorically—is more fundamentally the locus of suffered, social his-
tories, of more or less traumatic socialization. It is interpretive, but not
merely as “the confrontation of perspectives” or as “the living passage
from one perspective to another,” but rather in terms of the socio-his-
torically conditioned ability to bear the loss of entrenched perspectives—
which often have a defensive function—and negotiate new ones.
Blondel seems to almost endow metaphor and the body with animistic
power, to which he adds sexuality:
The body as a sexual cause then reveals itself to be the thing that produces
a being that, in questioning its own origins, questions its identity, evo-
lution and grouping habits. Moreover, the body, as an invisible anterior
origin is what produces us as beings who question things because we are
necessarily enigmatic to ourselves…Sexuality presents us as beings that are
unconscious of their origins and question themselves over the question of
origins…As a genealogical being, man merely manifests his position as a
being separated, by his corporeity, from his truth.26
Against Blondel’s view, one might invoke relational psychoanalysis’s criti-

cism of drive theory that drives are always conditioned and channeled
within relational histories. Sexuality may signify transcendence of the
body, and the pluralism and finitude of perspectives, but perspectives,
like sexuality, are conditioned by better or worse relational environments
in which one comes to negotiate its exposure to objectivity. Inhabiting
common, shared perspectives defends us from excess and complexity and
enables the security of the herd. Any transition between perspectives that
would reveal both the plurality of perspectives and the finitude of my own
would have conditions of possibility—namely, social histories of facilitat-
ing environments in which that plurality could be borne, step by step.
Blondel writes:
If genealogy is the discourse that consists in relating cultural phenomena

back to the body, it only really achieves this as a result of textual labour
and movement, which are irreducible to the systematic unity of dis-
course…the movement and labour of Nietzsche’s text constitute a Ja-
Sagen to life…Genealogical philosophy is dangerous…[it] does not depart
from discourse, but turns discourse back on itself through an imaginary
game…discourse and idea, intertwine in the movement and labour of the
text in a relation of saying and unsaying, just as in Nietzsche truth and
appearance contrast with one another in an infinite game.27
For Blondel, the goal is saying and unsaying, exceeding discourse, which
means affirming embodied life—not merely a “play of signifiers” but
again, a non-conceptual reality that exceeds all concepts in an infinite
pluralism infusing all singular perspectives. Nietzsche’s emphasis is not
on letting bodies speak—they always speak—rather, it is on the ordeal of
working-through fixated forms of suffered embodiment and the implied
social imperative of creating cultures to shelter and facilitate embodied
convalescence. Despite the admirable emphasis on textual labor, Blondel
occludes the broader suffered social history within which subjectivity and
writing take form. Letting the body speak through textual metaphor may
simply reproduce the status quo through countercultural ritual or a form
of maniacal release that would celebrate embodied need, in a Dionysian
affirmation of plurality, dance, and dissolution of identity. This would be
a reification of the body, which is abstracted from the messy socio-his-
torical imbrication discussed above; the body is primarily suffered and it
is socio-culturally mediated through this suffering which is inflected by
22 1 INTRODUCTION
loss, social arrangements, recognition, and the threat of losing that rec-
ognition.
Scenes of Subjectivity: Nietzsche with Marx and Freud
Various thinkers have linked Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche together as

offering some sort of shared theoretical position. Paul Ricoeur, for exam-
ple, famously calls the trio “masters of suspicion,” largely for the purpose
of saving the critical dimensions of their respective work from the more
metaphysical aspects. In contrast to this tradition, and following from the
preliminary discussion of Nietzsche above, one could say that this shared
critical position is one that insists that metaphysical independence—
which grounds dominant forms of epistemological and moral subjectiv-
ity—is the symptom of socio-historical dependence, i.e. subjectivity’s
imbrication within suffered, relational histories. Marx’s characterization
of the lived social origins of the reflecting subject and its ideologies,
for example, shows a provocative parallel to Nietzsche’s genealogies of
morality and to Freud’s diagnoses of subjectivity as symptomatic of trau-
matic relational history. These similar, yet quite different, accounts are
not merely based on suspicion or interpretation of contemporary culture,
but rather on attempts to formulate a more coherent historical and mate-
rialist account of the possibility of reflection and hence of overcoming
this culture. All three can be read as analyzing the suffered socio-histori-
cal scenes of which subjectivity is symptomatic.
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are not simply similar in regard to their
subversions of metaphysics, but rather, more importantly, in their inter-
rogations of the suffered conditions of reflection. In so doing, their
concepts resonate and reverberate with each other, contributing to provi-
sional sketches of the suffered prehistory of subjectivity and consequently
of the suffered prehistory of domination insofar as the sociality of this
prehistory reflects the ordeals of undergoing the imposition of division
of labor, the loss of infancy, or the loss of our nomadic ancestry. All three
contribute to the critique of the “pure, will-less, pain-less, timeless” sub-
ject that is symptomatic of the suffered excess of its histories.
On the one hand, for these thinkers, there is a suffered sociality—a
division of labor, a violence, loss or rupture that founds the subject: for
Nietzsche, the violent relation between slaves and master, and the impo-
sition of the social-straightjacket; for Freud, loss of parental care and
the socialization of the child; for Marx, primitive accumulation and the
SCENES OF SUBJECTIVITY: NIETZSCHE WITH MARX AND FREUD 23
division of labor. For each, this suffered sociality repeats itself; an amoral,
more or less traumatic meaninglessness repeats itself. On the other hand,
for each thinker, there is a social reproduction of a bad conscience in
relation to this imposition, such that the suffered, social history of this
imposition cannot be borne. In other words, there is a naturalization of
the status quo: in Marx, through ideology, commodity fetishism, and the
fixated social position of the working class; in Freud, through defense
against the traumatic character of the loss of infancy; in Nietzsche,
through slave morality, ascetic ideals, and consolation. Consequently,
each theory points toward the need to disrupt this naturalization—to
shelter and facilitate the working-through of this amoral meaninglessness
and create a convalescent culture where irredeemable suffering can be
negotiated, and integrated, insofar as integration is possible.
In the following chapters, Nietzsche’s thinking is read along with
aspects of Freudian theory and object relations psychoanalysis—spe-
cifically the theories of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott, as well as
Freud’s theory of mourning, which is the part of his theory that is per-
haps most closely aligned with object relations theory. The latter is some-
times also called relational psychoanalysis, a concept that resonates with
the emphasis on the social character of the suffered histories of the sub-
ject. For the purposes of this introduction, one might borrow the term
“scene” from Freud’s appeal to the primal scene (Urszene), to character-
ize the thinking of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, who can be said to con-
tribute to sketching the scenes of history.
During Freud’s analysis of the so-called “Wolfman,” a variety of symp-
toms are traced back to an inferred primal scene, in which as an infant,
the analysand would have observed parental coitus.28 In his description
of the case, Freud is notoriously ambiguous as to whether the primal
scene actually occurred or is constructed retrospectively through the dia-
logical and associative process of analysis. Similarly, Freud describes the
dream as a “substitute for an infantile scene modified by being trans-
ferred on to a recent experience.”29 Dreams might be said to originate
in the suffered, relational scenes of infancy, imbricated with social his-
tory. Compatible with the ambivalent character of the scene as both
remembered and constructed, one might infer general characteristics of
the intersubjective dynamics of infancy which are excessive, and more
or less impossible to navigate. Love of parental figures generally takes
place within ambivalent scenes: aggressive and negligent caregivers, with
disruptions and loss of their consistent attentiveness, shifting of their
24 1 INTRODUCTION
affection toward others, with upsurges of desire and aggression emerging

from within the infant, etc. One might say that Freud ultimately traces
symptomatic subjectivity back to the ways in which such suffered, rela-
tional scenes were negotiated.
These would be suffered, not causal scenes, in which the more or less
traumatic excess that is constitutive of such scenes would be primary.
The ambiguity of the scene as being both remembered and constructed not
only implies the interpretability of the scene, but also the excessive, rela-
tional materiality of the scene; what matters is how the excess is nego-
tiated and that points to an ability that cannot be accounted for by a
subjective trait, action, or sensibility. Moreover, tracing the present as a
symptom of a historical scene does not presuppose a sequential or causal
chain from a past, but rather implies that subjectivity is a negotiation of
that excess. The scene of exposure to more or less traumatic, overwhelm-
ing strangeness reverberates into the present within ongoing negotia-
tions of more or less traumatic, overwhelming strangeness. Nietzsche’s
genealogy is historical, only insofar as history is ongoing; the scene of
the loss of nomadism and the scene of the birth of slave morality and
the bad conscience are expressive of the scenes of modern subjectivity
as a socially mediated negotiation of excessive history. On the one hand,
genealogy, ideology critique, and psychoanalysis provide reflection with
maps of its own limit, its own genesis within scenes. On the other hand,
they signify the bearing and negotiation of scenes in transformative
ways; reflection on the past scene opens up a reflection on the present
and future scenes. The scene is the condition of possibility of reflection,
and all coherent reflection occurs for the sake of the scene. It is only by
taking care of the scene and transforming it that one takes care of the
subject and transforms it, rather than through morality, questioning,
responsibility to the other, suspicion, or other magical animism.
One might say that these scenes are more or less traumatic, which
would signify the potential of that excessive objectivity to overwhelm
primitive abilities to negotiate that objectivity. The reference to trauma
entails two imbricated levels: material and ideological. Our abilities to
negotiate the excessive character of objectivity are socio-historically con-
ditioned both by concrete material conditions which produce suffering—
through, for example, the expropriation of the agricultural population
from the land, the imposition of the social-straightjacket on nomadic
tribes, and the lack of consistent caregiving for infants—and symbolically,
through which certain forms of suffering are interpreted as “traumatic.”
As will be discussed in Chap. 3, in the second essay of Genealogy, the

same form of suffered embodiedness can be considered normal in one
culture, but unbearable in another. On the one hand, history entails
exposure to more or less traumatic loss and rupture, but on the other
hand, there is an internalized, often socially obligatory interpretation of
that loss or rupture.
Nietzschean convalescence, Freudian mourning, and certain impli-
cations of Marx’s critique of ideology would contribute to an account
of how this dominant mode of subjectivity and its need for magic and
security—needs that are conditioned by scenes—might slowly be trans-
formed. Neither shifts in concrete conditions nor in the subject’s think-
ing or will could alone accomplish this; rather, there would need to be a
subjectivity which is able to work-through its suffered scenes, along with
new forms of relationality which can facilitate this work. The ordeal of
freeing oneself from one’s fixatedness within history implies the ability to
bear the work of separating from the dominant ideology or social allure
of fetishism, in order to transform them.
The first paragraph of the Preface to Marx’s text, The German
Ideology, implies a materialist critique of the subject that is in many ways
similar to that of Nietzsche. For Marx, reflection arises within suffered,
relational scenes. He writes:
Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions

about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They
have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal
man, etc.…They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let
us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings…
Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts
which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical
attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and—
existing reality will collapse…These innocent and childlike fancies are the
kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy…30
Here, Marx seems to echo Nietzsche’s critique of magical forms of sub-

jectivity by which liberation would supposedly be attained by a proper
way of thinking or criticism, as if a change in ideas would produce a
change in society. In this implicit appeal to magic, dominant ideal-
ism tries to separate itself from socio-historical embodiment, seeing it
as merely mundane. In a letter to Feuerbach, Marx writes: “… Those
Berliners do not think that they are human beings that happen to
26 1 INTRODUCTION
criticize, but ‘Critics’ who beside that are unlucky enough to be human
beings as well. They therefore recognize only one real need, the need
for theoretical criticism … Consciousness, or self-consciousness, is per-
ceived as the only human quality. Even love is being denied, since in
it the beloved one is just ‘an object’. Down with the object!”31 As we
have seen in the passages above from Nietzsche, there is a similar cri-
tique of the idealism which posits a cause within subjectivity that could
direct itself toward morality or truth. Neither thinker sees that idealism
as being merely an “error” that is to be replaced by a true alternative;
rather, that idealism is itself seen as being reproduced by material his-
tory; Marx’s appeal to the division of labor has a parallel in Nietzsche’s
account of noble and slave. Moreover, as with Nietzsche, the ideal-
ist conception of subjectivity expresses an attempt to separate from that
which is inseparable.
To some extent, Marx sees the interrogation of this material history
as a positivistic endeavor.32 As has been suggested, for Nietzsche, such
an interrogation is thwarted by an excessive suffered element of that his-
tory of which that interrogation would be symptomatic. It seems to be
the case that for Marx, history is accessible through a relentless empiri-
cal social science, whereas for Nietzsche, history is a suffered relational
field. Nonetheless, one might see this as more of a difference of empha-
sis, such that Marx’s critique of the subject lays out essential dimensions
of the scene of suffered life. Whereas philosophy distinguishes humans
from animals by consciousness, for Marx, it is the social production of
the means of subsistence that distinguishes humans and produces con-
sciousness:
Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage

as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental
production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion,
metaphysics, etc. of a people. Men are producers of their conceptions,
ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite develop-
ment of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to
these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else
than conscious existence, and the existence is their actual life-process. If in
all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a cam-
era obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-
process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical
life process.33
On our reading, the reference to camera obscura here is not merely an

assertion of the untruth of ideology to which one could contrast a right-
side-up account of truth yielded by positivistic science. For philosophy,
humans appear to be independent free-willing consciousnesses, respon-
sible for their fate, due to the spatial and temporal separation from the
labor of another class—enslaved, colonized, or manual wage-laborers,
along with the environmental externalities of this labor process, etc.—
which produces the means of subsistence for those humans. In other
words, there is a spatial and temporal distance from monumental trag-
edies of primitive accumulation—for example, the genocide of the native
population of the Americas, chattel slavery, the world wars and histories
of neo-colonialism, and third world sweatshop labor. From this per-
spective, ideology is not merely a faulty mode of discourse or thinking,
but rather a mode of discourse or thinking arising from a certain fix-
ated social position, a temporal and spatial partiality. This coincides with
Marx’s description of commodity exchange whereby the marketplace
seems to be the sole locus of social relationships facilitated by rule-gov-
erned exchange, because the social history of the object is not directly
perceivable due to temporal and spatial distance. A seemingly innocent
object that seems to become social in the act of exchange is already the
manifestation of an excessive social history lying beyond the horizon of
the reflecting subject.34 Its appearance as endowed with exchange value
would not be an error or mistake, but rather the point of view of the
object from a particular perspective. The problem then is not a cognitive
error but rather a fixation of a situated subject that cannot transgress its
position in time and place.
In this situated context, ideology might be seen as both expressing
and reproducing that fixation of the subject’s situation. One way this
works is through the fetishization of commodities, which implies a form
of social relations mediated by a quasi-religious sanctification of ahistori-
cal exchange value, through which recognition and status are attained.
On the other hand, non-conformity with this fetish compromises recog-
nition and status. The philosophical valorization of the pure subject is
then ideological to the extent that it reproduces a seeming detachment
from social history. Ideology is the reflection of the position of those
doing intellectual labor, whose position has become fixated such that
the division of labor seems natural. The dependence of consciousness
on the working class, and on the ability to satisfy our needs, is both not
28 1 INTRODUCTION
apparent and not bearable, insofar as dissolving that dependence would

produce a more intense type of suffering.
This Marxian reflection cannot gain transparency through some sort
of method, because that social history which reflection would access is
always already conditioning the reflection; the ideology is always express-
ing and reproducing the fixation of partiality; fetishization is always
reproducing the sanctification of exchange that mediates the social rela-
tionships of the reflecting subject. One might say that in Marx, there is
a tension between, on the one hand, appeals to empirical social science
that presupposes a subject capable of accessing truth through proper
method and, on the other hand, the insistence on the suffered, social
mediation of subjectivity. Perhaps Marx can be read with our reading of
Nietzsche, as emphasizing the latter. This would account for the recalci-
trance of one’s fixation on ideology, which is not merely a false perspec-
tive, but a socially produced need.
The premises of material history identified by Marx might be under-
stood as parameters of suffered social scenes. Empiricism may help to
conceptualize these parameters, but there is an aspect of Marx’s concep-
tion of history which essentially resists its incorporation into a concept.
If concepts are symptomatic of social relations, so it is with the concepts
produced by this empirical science, which is itself conditioned by mate-
rial history; it does not yield ahistorical knowledge, but rather amounts
to a reflection on its own conditions of possibility. Marx writes:
Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins:

the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of devel-
opment of men…When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent
branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best, its place
can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstrac-
tions which arise from the observation of the historical development of
men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves
no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of
historical material…they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does
philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history…our difficulties
begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement—the
real depiction—of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the
present…we shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use in
contradistinction to the ideologists, and shall illustrate them by historical
examples.35
Even when asserting this positivist critique of social history, Marx

acknowledges that his concepts arise from observation of history, with-
out which they would have no value. They cannot schematize history,
but simply facilitate the arrangement of historical material, where the
real difficulties begin. This might be read through Freud’s characteriza-
tion of psychoanalysis as a form of Wissenschaft, about which he writes:
“No belittlement of science [Wissenschaft] can in any way alter the fact
that it is attempting to take account of our dependence on the real exter-
nal world…”.36 Marx’s positivism might be seen as a fallible attempt to
interrogate our dependence on “the real external world”, i.e., the con-
crete social scenes within which subjects are borne and act.
The claim that these premises are empirically verifiable might also be
seen to imply what Adorno calls the primacy of the object. For Adorno,
the dialectic between subject and object is only coherent to the extent
that it avows that the subject is undergirded, conditioned, and ruptured
by the object that it tries to identify. The appeal to certain empirically
verifiable facts of human existence would not thereby reduce that exist-
ence to such facts, but rather contribute to a sketch of the suffered social
conditions of human subjectivity. These conditions would constitute
a scene, which is similar to an Adornian constellation, in which the rela-
tionship between objects expresses that which cannot be identified. In
other words, in the relationship between the empirically verifiable aspects
of history, the suffered non-identical speaks. Adorno writes: “already
in Marx the difference is expressed between the preponderance of the
object as something to be critically established and its remnants in the
existent, its distortion by the commodity-form. Exchange has…real
objectivity and is nevertheless objectively untrue, violates its own prin-
ciple, that of equality, that is why it necessarily creates false conscious-
ness, the idol of the market …” (Adorno 1966, 190). The primacy of
the object expresses itself through the distortion of reflection that may
be directed toward that primacy; the object is not primarily known, but
suffered as the non-identical—that which motivates, conditions, and rup-
tures subjectivity.
For Marx,
The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in pro-
creation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural,
on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-opera-
tion of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner
30 1 INTRODUCTION
and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or
industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation,
or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a ‘productive force’.
Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines
the nature of society, hence, that the ‘history of humanity’ must always be
studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange.37
It is only within such scenes of cooperation or division of labor that

consciousness emerges. It does not emerge magically as a pure sponta-
neity, but rather as a symptom of that suffered division of labor: “Only
now … do we find that man also possesses ‘consciousness’, but, even
so, not inherent, not ‘pure’ consciousness. From the start the ‘spirit’
is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here
makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in
short, of language…”.38 Divisions of labor, systems of production, and
forms of social intercourse are parameters of social power at a given time
and place; they mediate the lives of suffering, exposed human beings. In
short, the value of the empirical analyses is not a given, but rather derived
from the suffered, negativity of history which is mediated by those posi-
tive aspects. Poverty, for example, can be analyzed through empirical
methods, but its truth lies in the way in which it is suffered. One can
use empirical methods to interrogate the history of chattel slavery, but
the positive facts that are discovered entail the negativity of the unspeak-
able, non-identical suffering of those involved. Despite his positivism,
Marx can be read as sketching out scenes in which the drama of history
unfolds, in which contradictions are suffered and “worked-through.”
For all three of these thinkers—Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud—the
sketching of the scene emerges from the ordeal of coming to be able
to bear our abject origins and imbrications of suffered, social, embod-
ied, instinctual, loss-infused histories. This is the ordeal of bearing the
reflection that our ostensibly independent subjectivity is symptomatic of
a concrete embeddedness in suffered, social scenes. The possibility of dif-
ferent scenes is what is yielded by these forms of historical critique, if it
can bear the exposure and vulnerability implied by its immersion within
historical scenes where it approaches the limit of its identity; it thereby
entails the projection of a future of different scenes more protective,
facilitative of that vulnerability.
The value of the historical narratives of these thinkers does not lie in
their truth or untruth, or the untruth of their truth, but rather in their
RICOEUR, KOFMAN, FOUCAULT 31
depiction of the suffered, social history within which “truth” and the
subject arise. They function to open up a conceptual space within which
concepts face their limits in the object’s negativity, which, as Adorno
says, is experienced by the subject as suffering. Historical critique evokes
the negativity of history along with its conceptualization of that history.
Its concepts are self-consciously tentative, put forward as proposed archi-
tectonics of socio-historical existence which undergirds, conditions, and
exceeds the concept. Any thinking which does not avow its own depend-
ence on suffered social life reproduces the social conditions from which it
would like to escape.
Ricoeur, Kofman, Foucault

On our reading, the main point of similarity between Nietzsche, Marx,
and Freud is that culturally dominant assertions of the metaphysical inde-
pendence of the subject are symptomatic of a socio-historical depend-
ence. For all three, suffered, social history produces a symptomatic
allergy to itself in the form of fantasies of dissociation, of purity, and of
efficacy over and above unbearable social histories. In turn, for all three,
this allergy is naturalized, reproducing the status quo. To provide some
contrast, one might consider the accounts of these thinkers by Ricoeur,
Kofman, and Foucault, which remain largely subjectivist insofar as they
seem to abstract the gesture of critique from the relational scenes in
which it is ineluctably embedded.
Paul Ricoeur famously labeled these three thinkers “masters of suspi-
cion.” According to Ricoeur, “the distinguishing characteristic of Marx,
Freud, and Nietzsche is the general hypothesis concerning both the pro-
cess of false consciousness and the method of deciphering … the man
of suspicion carries out in reverse the work of falsification of the man
of guile.”39 Ricoeur suggests that the concepts of the Freudian real-
ity principle, Nietzsche’s eternal return, and Marx’s understood neces-
sity express “the positive benefit of the ascesis required by a reductive
and destructive interpretation: confrontation with bare necessity, the
discipline of Ananke, of necessity.”40 On this characterization of the
work of these thinkers, the subjective act of suspicion is associated with
a variety of other subjectivist terms: “demystification,” “deciphering,”
“interpretation,” but also “understanding of necessity” and “meditation
on ciphers.” These subjective acts are characterized as implicitly enact-
ing an animating force coming from within the subject which would
32 1 INTRODUCTION
“counterattack” false consciousness.41 Ricoeur portrays the subject’s

relation to necessity in the work of these thinkers as a confrontation that
takes the form of a hermeneutics of suspicion.
On our reading, Ricoeur’s characterization of the problem as inter-
pretation’s confrontation with necessity is better understood as the suf-
fered historical mediation of reflection. How would suspicion or its
counter-concept, false consciousness, arise within a suffered, social
context? What precisely is the relationship to necessity of those within
false consciousness? Is it a lack of confrontation? How would one avoid
necessity, which is by definition unavoidable? As has been suggested, the
excessive character of social history is primarily suffered and defended
against, not merely “understood,” “confronted,” or not “understood”
or not “confronted.” Necessity as excess cannot be avoided; it is negoti-
ated or undergone as an ordeal. A mere ascesis of accommodating oneself
to necessity—as Ricoeur suggests—occludes the need to transform social
conditions so that necessity is not traumatic and therefore not defended
against. One’s ability to negotiate this excess is itself socio-historically
conditioned, and that ability would be the condition of possibility of the
deciphering that Ricoeur sees at the heart of Nietzschean, Freudian, and
Marxian hermeneutics.
In Camera Obscura of Ideology, Sarah Kofman contests metaphysical
readings of all three thinkers, insisting on the heterogeneous, complexly
metaphorical nature of their texts. She suggests that the heterogeneity of
Marx’s text points beyond any appeals to the scientific character of ideol-
ogy critique, toward the transgression of the theoretical:
…it would serve no purpose to lift the veil in order to make reality
appear in its transparency…the darkness is primary and cannot be over-
come through theory, through a pure and simple unveiling…he declares
that only practical tranformations may—and then after a ‘long and pain-
ful development’—bring about transparent and rational relationships…
Clear meaning thus does not pre-exist ideological obscurity, and there is
no ‘truth’ without a labour of transformation. Clarity comes only in the
moment of the after-effect and is attained, not through a resolution of the-
oretical contradictions, but through a practical revolution.42
Kofman identifies the central critical element in Marx as the transgression

of the theoretical, and the locating of truth in practical transformation.
On our reading, the theoretical and the practical, as the primary activities
of subjectivity, are symptomatic of more or less traumatic social histories.

The fixated subject is not stuck in the theoretical as such, but rather in a
particular form of defensive mechanism expressive of an inability to bear
the negativity of history. This defensive position, symptomatic of rela-
tional scenes, entails recalcitrance of both the theoretical and practical.
One cannot just “transgress” the theoretical for an alternative—such as
the practical, the body, or being—since any such alternative will be theo-
rized. What is needed is a form of reflection which avows its own suf-
fered social histories inclusive of the needs and the vulnerability which
motivate it. Nietzsche captures this with the terms “convalescence” and
“genealogy.”
Kofman’s account does not capture the need for metaphysics, science,
and likewise the need for the homogeneity of the text. She starts from
the text, but the text’s homogeneity and heterogeneity are themselves
symptoms of a suffered history—a history of convalescence or ressenti-
ment. The convalescent’s words are situated within an objectivity which
conditions and ruptures them. In light of Marx’s claim that reflection
is only possible because of the division of labor, Kofman’s identifica-
tion of Marx’s valorization of the labor of transformation occludes the
ways in which the histories of labor have conditioned the possibility of
reflection and labor that undergird and reproduce the domination of the
theoretical. The theoretical is a symptom of labor, not an alternative, and
amelioration would not merely lie in the transgression of the theoreti-
cal through an engaged practice, but rather through theoretically guided
practices, or practically guided theories, that are able to bear their own
abject histories.
Similarly, Kofman suggests that Freud’s apparent scientism and reli-
ance on mechanistic models are simply moments in a heterogene-
ous metaphorical text that evoke a passage that is not theoretical, but
practical. She writes that, for Freud as in Marx, “only a transformation
of the balance of forces leads to clarity. To pass from darkness to light
is not, then, to rediscover a meaning already there, it is to construct a
meaning which has never existed as such … full meaning has never been
present…”.43 The appeal to an abstractly conceived “transformation of
the balance of forces” echoes the abstraction inherent in the claim that
Marx uses metaphor to transgress the theoretical and enter the practi-
cal. Kofman substitutes abstractly conceived practice for the suffered
social ordeal of transformation, expressive of the need to convalesce, and
34 1 INTRODUCTION
thereby to be able to bear the loss of engrained, socially obligatory con-

cepts and practical habits.
For Kofman, Nietzsche surpasses Marx and Freud, insofar as he
explicitly and consciously undermines science and the metaphors which
support it, by generalizing the camera obscura or, as she says, general-
izing perspectivalism. She writes: “If all is obscurity, then nothing is.
Nietzschean deconstruction always passes through a phase of hierarchi-
cal reversal, with the generalization of one of the two opposed terms…
to generalize the camera obscura is, in short, to render it, as a metaphor,
precarious, to denounce it as belonging to metaphysics…”.44 This equat-
ing of the generalization of the camera obscura with Nietzsche’s perspec-
tivalism is decidedly subjectivist, albeit as a critique of metaphysics. On
our reading, perspectivalism is only possible for a subject who can conva-
lesce, bearing the loss of its attachment to culturally fetishized positions.
For Kofman, it reflects Nietzschean deconstruction, as a general critique
of transparency which “denounces” metaphysics grounded in the opposi-
tion between “obscurity” and “transparency.” Here, perspectivalism is a
way of thinking, as is the metaphysics it seeks to deconstruct:
The point of view which sees relations as inverted is that neither of error
nor of illusion. It is that of a certain kind of mind—an anti-artistic one—
which wants to see reality without veils, naked, from the point of view of
indecency. Naked, in broad daylight, outside of the dark chamber of con-
sciousness. It is the perspective of those who are unaware that, behind the
veil, there is yet another veil. It is the symptomatic unawareness of the
instincts’ loss of virility. To seek the unveiling of truth is to reveal that one
no longer knows how to get it on with women…a perverse judgement,
by instincts neither strong enough nor fine enough to love appearance for
appearance’s sake…45
Kofman’s account, as is typical of so-called deconstructive accounts, ulti-

mately appeals to a type of subjectivist account of metaphysics: “a cer-
tain kind of mind … which wants to see reality without veils … naked
… It is the perspective of those who are unaware that, behind the veil,
there yet another veil …”. In contrast, we have suggested that there is a
need for metaphysics, expressive of a historically conditioned form of the
ascetic ideal. This is not simply an “unawareness” of the instincts’ “loss
of virility,” but rather a certain socio-historically produced imbrication of
instincts with time and suffering, which shapes a symptomatic form of

consciousness. This need is the legacy of an ongoing social history that
imposed a more or less traumatic loss of nomadic freedom and produced
an obliterated subject unable to contend with the negativity of history.
To celebrate Nietzsche’s “deconstruction” as some sort of radical gesture
of reflection, which could liberate itself from the illusion of transparency,
is to valorize a type of magical subjectivity that leaves objective condi-
tions in place.
Although there is value in the deconstructing of truth, it would be
one moment within a broader suffering of the objectivity that conditions
a subject who is aware of the lack of a reality behind the veils. Kofman
makes no connection between the excessive element of social history
implicit in the analyses of each of these thinkers—the abject origin of
the division of labor, the loss of infancy, the suffered ordeal of slavery—
and the two subjective positions she interrogates: the scientific belief in
the truth that is dependent on the specular metaphor vs. the deployment
of a heterogeneity of the metaphorical. The critique therefore remains
within a subjectivist frame, oblivious to the object’s conditioning of the
subject.
Michel Foucault suggests that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud created a
new model of reflection by which the subject would engage in an inter-
minable, inexhaustible critique of depth, i.e., a critique of that which
would supposedly lie behind and ground interpretation. For Foucault,
“from Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, signs are themselves stages in a much
more differentiated space, according to a dimension that we could call
depth, on the condition that one understand by that not interiority but,
on the contrary, exteriority.”46 Nietzsche critiques the idea of depth—
“an invention of philosophers”—as some sort of
pure, interior search for truth … one can in reality traverse this descending
line only to restore the sparkling exteriority that has been covered up and
buried. The fact is that whereas the interpreter must go himself to the bot-
tom of things like an excavator, the movement of interpretation is, on the
contrary, one that projects out over the depth, raised more and more above
the depth, always leaving the depth below, exposed to ever greater visibility
… the eagle’s taking flight, the ascent of the mountain, all the verticality so
important in Zarathustra, is, in the strict sense, the reversal of depth, the
discovery that depth was only a game, and a crease [pli] in the surface.47
36 1 INTRODUCTION
For Foucault, this hermeneutics is the reversal of the philosophical illu-

sion of internal depth, by an ever-expanding revelation of exteriority, i.e.,
of the subject’s internality being imbricated within externality. As has
been suggested above, though, that illusion of internal depth is itself a
symptom of social conditions that cannot be dissolved through subjec-
tive action alone; the subjective action that would carry through such
an interpretation is itself mediated by its suffered social scenes. Just like
the animistic subjectivity that Foucault presupposes, the “interiority” to
which he appeals—as the metaphysical expression of modernity—is also
already the expression of an unbearable imbrication of external and inter-
nal, within suffered, social histories. The socio-historically conditioned
need for this “philosophical illusion” is occluded in Foucault’s analysis.
That need is not merely attributable to philosophers; rather, the latter are
only understood in their emergence within the broader cultural histories
described in On the Genealogy of Morality. The philosophical need is a
version of the ascetic ideal more broadly conceived, and that ideal, in all
of its incarnations, is socio-historically reproduced as a more fundamental
allergy to the negativity that is both internal and external. No practice
of interpretation—in effect a sort of spontaneous subjective action—
could overpower that more primary socio-historically conditioned abil-
ity or inability to negotiate that more or less or less traumatic excess of
history. Nietzsche’s genealogy is the form of working-through that suf-
fered origin of subjectivity, which conditions that subjective power to
interpret that Foucault presupposes. The transposition of internal depth
into an ever-expanding externality could only emerge from the ordeal of
negotiating that excess. It would rest on the ability, as Nietzsche says, to
engage and disengage our pros and cons, our good and bad. And, this
ability is not a given, but forged within suffered, social histories.
For Foucault, interpretation is always incomplete, because
there is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, because at bottom eve-

rything is already an interpretation. Each sign is in itself not the thing
that presents itself to interpretation, but the interpretation of other signs
… This is seen already in the works of Marx, which do not interpret the
history of relations of production, but which interpret a relation that,
inasmuch as it presents itself as nature, is already giving itself as an inter-
pretation. Likewise, Freud does not interpret signs, but interpretations
… he does not discover, as one says, “traumatisms”—he brings to light
fantasies … Anorexia, for example, is not sent back to weaning, as the
signifier would refer to the signified; but anorexia as sign, as a symptom

to interpret, refers to fantasies of the false maternal breast, which is itself
an interpretation … In the same way, Nietzsche makes himself master of
interpretations which have already seized one another. There is no original
signified for Nietzsche.48
Granting that there is truth value in Foucault’s insistence on the lack of

a signified to guide the interpretation of these three thinkers, there is still
a danger of dematerializing interpretation. His claim that Freud does
not discover traumatisms—but rather interpretations behind interpreta-
tions—would still need to account for the ability or inability to engage
in infinite interpretation as something other than spontaneity, openness,
or other form of subjective magic. On our reading, Nietzsche empha-
sizes the more or less traumatic social scenes within which interpretation
arises, and which thereby condition the form which interpretation takes.
Trauma in this sense is not a cause, but evokes the breach of the suf-
fered horizon of relational beings. In this context, regimes of interpreta-
tion of signs which discover the signified would be read as symptomatic
of defenses against more or less traumatic exposure, and the intermina-
ble interpretation valorized by Foucault would need to be understood
as a form of suffered exposure. Interpretation abstracted from the suf-
fered potentiality of traumatic exposure risks expressing a defensiveness
against this exposure—a defensiveness that may reproduce the status quo
rather than contribute to its amelioration. In contrast, on our reading,
Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud help us conceive of the vicissitudes of this
exposure as either worked-through or defended against.
For Foucault, these thinkers point toward a practice of interminable
interpretation which unsettles the violence perpetuated by forms of inter-
pretation grounded within fixated signifieds. However, if interpretations
are obligatory, internalized social fetishes that are libidinally charged,
revealing a lack of a “signified” would in itself be an ineffective politi-
cal gesture: first, because such revelation would not change the scenes
which give rise to the subject; second, because such a revelation would
itself only be possible through an ability to convalesce from one’s ties to
idealism. For Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, the subject arises within more
or less traumatic scenes of weaning, of division of labor and mass sociali-
zation, and of social production of values—scenes in which the suffered
ordeals of socialization are repeated. Consequently, the critique of meta-
physics is not merely a subjective act, but an ordeal of working-through
38 1 INTRODUCTION
one’s relational objectivity, the possibility of which is conditioned by suf-

fered sociality. There is no signified, but there are material conditions
which give rise to particular forms of subjectivity with consequences
for not obeying. The “endless” interpretations are only discoverable by
a subject who is able to bear the ordeal of its history within relational
scenes.
One wonders whether this appeal to a critical subject who uses meta-
phors, interprets, or suspects is merely a more contemporary expression
of the ascetic ideal—precisely in the magic with which it endows the sub-
ject—and hence another form of the status quo. Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud can perhaps be seen as inscribing even this interpreting subject
within broader excessive socio-historical dramas. The excessive character
of the division of labor, the rift between master and slave, and the loss of
parental care would indicate a constitutive vulnerability of the subject.
Theoretical appeals to hermeneutics, suspicion, and metaphor may ges-
ture in this direction, but in ways that seem to occlude their own vulner-
ability to excessive history and their own implicit tendencies to defend
against that history and thereby reproduce the crisis they long to amelio-
rate.
Notes
1. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Translated by Dennis Redmond,
151. All subsequent references will be cited in the text.
2. This thought is clearly expressed in The Gay Science: “In favour of criti-
cism. —Something you formerly loved as a truth or a probability now
strikes you as an error; you cast it off and believe your reason has made
a victory. But maybe that error was as necessary for you then, when you
were still another person—you are always another person—as are all your
present ‘truths’, like a skin that concealed and covered many things you
weren’t allowed to see yet. It is your new life, not your reason, that has
killed that opinion for you: you don’t need it any more …”. See Nietzsche,
The Gay Science, Translated by Nauckhoff, 174–175.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Edited by Keith Ansell-
Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 87. All subsequent references will be cited in the
text.
4. For Nietzsche, willing is not a simple, self-evident result of a free action
of “I” as cause. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil, he writes: “… our
body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls—. L’effet
NOTES 39
c’est moi: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed

and happy community: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes
of the community. All willing is simply a matter of commanding and
obeying on the groundwork, as I have said, of a society constructed out
of many ‘souls’… ”. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 19–20.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, in The
Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, 141.
6. “The arrogance inherent in cognition and feeling casts a blinding fog over
the eyes and senses…and because it contains within itself the most flat-
tering evaluation of cognition it deceives them about the value of exist-
ence.” Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie”, 142.
7. Ibid., 143.
8. Ibid., 143.
9. Ibid., 143.
10. Ibid., 145.
11. Ibid., 146.
12. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 211–214.
13. Nietzsche writes: “… all our actions are incomparably and utterly per-
sonal, unique, and boundlessly individual … but as soon as we translate
them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be … everything which
enters consciousness thereby becomes shallow, thin, relatively stupid, gen-
eral, a sign, a herd-mark … all becoming conscious involves a vast and
thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization
… ” See The Gay Science, 213–214.
14. In “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”, Nietzsche writes:
“Everything which distinguishes human beings from animals depends on
this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors into a schema, in other words,
to dissolve an image into a concept … something becomes possible in the
realm of these schemata which could never be achieved in the realm of
those sensuous first impressions, namely the construction of a pyramidal
order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, priv-
ileges, subordinations, definitions of borders…. Whereas every metaphor
standing for a sensuous perception is individual and unique and is there-
fore always able to escape classification, the great edifice of concepts exhibits
the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium, which logic breathes out that
air of severity and coolness which is peculiar to mathematics. Anyone who
has been touched by that cool breath will scarcely believe that concepts too,
which are as bony and eight-cornered as a dice and just as capable of being
shifted around, are only the left-over residue of a metaphor … ‘truth’ means
using each die in accordance with its designation, counting its spots pre-
cisely, forming correct classifications, and never offending against the order
of castes nor against the sequence of the classes of rank” (146–147).
40 1 INTRODUCTION
15. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

16. Ibid., 176.
17. Ibid., 176–177.
18. Ibid., 179–180.
19. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: the Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological
Genealogy.
20. Blondel, 53.
21. Ibid., 74.
22. As will be discussed in Chap. 5, D.W. Winnicott also insists on this rela-
tional history as a condition of possibility of the embodied language val-
orized by Blondel.
23. He writes: “Is it not as a body thinking that Nietzsche’s thought makes it
impossible to have a strictly conceptual foundation?…Taking ‘the body
as a guiding thread’, this interpretive thought based on a multiplicity of
drives can have recourse only to metaphoricity as a scheme of body think-
ing…both a body that thinks and an interpretative thinking that thinks
about the body” (Blondel, 239).
24. Blondel, 245–246.
25. Ibid., 246.
26. Ibid., 250–251.
27. Ibid., 258.
28. See Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, 17, 29–47.
29. See Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, 5, 546.
30. Marx, The German Ideology, 37.
31. Marx, Werke, vol. XXVII, 427.
32. In The German Ideology, Marx writes: “… we do not set out from what
men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imag-
ined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from
real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate
the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.
The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates
of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to
material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology
and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the
semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but
men, developing their material production and their material intercourse,
alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products
of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but conscious-
ness by life …” (47).
NOTES 41
34. See Marx, Capital, 125–177, 871–895.

36. Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, 22, 174–175.
38. Ibid., 145
39. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 34.
40. Ibid., 35.
41. Ricoeur writes: “All three, however, far from being detractors of ‘con-
sciousness,’ aim at extending it. What Marx wants is to liberate praxis by
the understanding of necessity; but this liberation is inseparable from a
‘conscious insight’ which victoriously counterattacks the mystification of
false consciousness.” (35).
42. Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology, 19.
43. Ibid., 27–28.
44. Ibid., 40–41.
45. Ibid., 42–43.
46. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”, 62.
47. Ibid., 246.
48. Ibid., 64–65.
CHAPTER 2
Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality
Nietzsche’s thinking was significantly preoccupied with the notion

of convalescence (die Genesung), at least from the time of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra onward. Beginning in that text—in later works, in prefaces
composed for earlier works, and in Ecce Homo—there is a crucial employ-
ment of this term, and related terms, suggesting that it was Nietzsche’s
mature judgment that his entire body of work be viewed retrospec-
tively as arising in one way or another from out of the problem of con-
valescence. Nietzsche’s preoccupation from the very beginning with the
themes of suffering, healing, and overcoming could be seen to support
such a reading.
Whereas in everyday language convalescence is the “gradual recov-
ery of health and strength after disease,” Nietzsche gives this common
understanding critical cultural significance.1 This chapter explores key
moments of Nietzsche’s attempt to characterize what might be seen as
cultural convalescence. It begins by comparing Nietzsche’s notion of con-
valescence with certain dimensions of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the
work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), which provides a model for the sus-
tained working-through (Durcharbeitung) required to decathect from
internalized cultural ideals. Nietzschean convalescence can perhaps
then be seen more clearly as a model for a gradual, suffered working-
through of the cultural legacy of ressentiment, which has been internal-
ized. Nietzsche’s portrayal of Zarathustra as “The Convalescent” can be
seen to capture the performative dimension of this work. I then contrast
this characterization of convalescence with two prominent interpretations

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6_2
44 2 CONVALESCENCE, MOURNING, AND SOCIALITY
of the “New Nietzsche,” namely those of Jacques Derrida and Gilles

Deleuze.2
The Derridean and Deleuzean readings of Nietzsche were monumen-
tal not only for subsequent Nietzsche scholarship, but more generally
for the subsequent development of Continental philosophy and certain
strains of social theory. By appealing to Nietzsche as a writer of diffé-
rance or as a thinker of affirmation and diagnostician of reactive forces,
these provocative thinkers recognize the essential performative nature of
Nietzsche’s philosophy. Yet, however provocative, these thinkers tend to
ignore Nietzsche’s emphasis on convalescence and thereby occlude the
problem of convalescent suffering which is central to his thinking. The
non-presence of the Nietzschean subject arises primarily from its suffered
socialization through which it carries the weight of pathological history,
primarily in the form of dominant religious tradition and its stand-ins
(nationalisms, racisms, etc.). Only convalescence—a slow, bit-by-bit,
concretely suffered, working-through—offers a path of healing for a vul-
nerable subject scarred with the embedded habitualities of cultures of res-
sentiment. In effect, the appeals to writing and affirmation amount to
new subtle forms of subjectivism when those actions are not carried out
within a suffered sociality that can bear its objectivity slowly, patiently,
and coldly.
Convalescence and Mourning
Nietzsche is linked with Freud in Derrida’s well-known essay,

“Différance,” where it is argued that the work of both thinkers serves
to challenge the authority of presence, the “limit which has always con-
strained us, which still constrains us—as inhabitants of a language and a
system of thought…”3 Derrida writes:
Thus one comes to posit presence…no longer as the absolutely central

form of Being but as a ‘determination’ and as an ‘effect.’ A determina-
tion or an effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but
of différance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activ-
ity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and
determination, etc.…Before being so radically and purposely the gesture
of Heidegger, this gesture was also made by Nietzsche and Freud, both of
whom, as is well known, and sometimes in a similar fashion, put conscious-
ness into question in its assured certainty of itself…is it not remarkable that
they both did so on the basis of the motif of différance?4
CONVALESCENCE AND MOURNING 45
For Derrida, both Freud and Nietzsche see the subject as a function of
textuality, which is governed by non-phonetic writing. Writing—as archi-
writing, the writing of différance—would thus precede and enable the
subject as presence. Both thinkers would then essentially be critics of phi-
losophy as the ontology of presence and as such provide models for the
thinking of différance, in which “putting into question of the authority
of consciousness is first and always differential … All the differences in
the production of unconscious traces and in the processes of inscription
(Niederschrift) can also be interpreted as moments of différance…”.5
According to his strategy, Derrida will put the criticisms of Nietzsche and
Freud into play not only against the lingering metaphysics found in the
Nietzschean and Freudian texts themselves, but also when reading other
figures. For example, in problematizing the “nostalgia” of “a lost native
country of thought” implicit in the Heideggerian naming of “Being,”
Derrida appeals to Nietzsche, who “puts affirmation into play, in a cer-
tain laughter and a certain step of the dance.”6 But, does this valoriza-
tion of affirmation as play, laughter, and dance do justice to Nietzsche’s
convalescent thinking?
Other readings of the relationship between Nietzsche and Freud
(who, along with many in his circle, was very familiar with Nietzsche)
are possible.7 One might, for example, compare Freud’s notion of the
work of mourning with Nietzschean convalescence—a comparison not
made by Derrida or Deleuze—to help to clarify the suffered character
of thinking for Nietzsche. Both mourning and convalescence are con-
crete, salutary processes of undergoing a materiality that undergirds and
exceeds consciousness. The mourner undergoes a concrete disruption in
losing her object. She does not think or will her way out of her pain, but
slowly works through it, withdrawing and reinvesting libido. The conva-
lescent, in a similar fashion, suffers a wound that is beyond her control,
and she is obliged to allow the body to adjust, adapt, and retrain itself
on an incalculable timeline. In both cases, thinking and all that comes
with it (understanding, expectation, idealization, etc.) is worked on by a
concrete disruption of material life. Mourning and convalescence are not
simply “subjective” actions or internal experiences. They are modes of
suffering objectivity, of the subject’s embeddedness as an object within a
relational world of objects, of things, and of others. They are subjective
experiences of the suffered limit of subjectivity. That suffering works on
the situated subject, bit by bit, in a fragmentary way, such that thoughts,
expectations, goals, and values are suffered in their limit. To use the
Adornian language discussed in Chap. 4, identifying concepts confront

the non-identity of what is conceptualized.
There are at least three initial conceptual problems with this com-
parison between mourning and convalescence. First, in common
understanding, convalescence is thought to be a physical process, and
mourning is thought to be a psychological process. Clearly, however,
any absolute distinction between the two would seem to presuppose a
problematic metaphysical dualism which divides the world into “mind”
and “body,” which both Nietzsche and Freud clearly rejected. There are
physical (libidinal, bodily) dimensions of mourning, as well as psycho-
logical dimensions to convalescence. Second, convalescence is thought
to be futural, whereas mourning is thought to be essentially tied to
the past. The action of the verb “to convalesce” points toward a heal-
ing or getting better, a future point at which a wound will be overcome.
Mourning, on the other hand, is often thought to simply be a retro-
spective grieving for something that has been lost. Again, though, such
simplistic distinctions must be questioned. The convalescent is in some
important sense bound by the history of her injury, embedded in a psy-
cho-physical working-through of that history that is the condition of
possibility for any openness toward the future. Similarly, the mourner’s
recathexis is the flip side of her remembrance, i.e., by working through
the past, she is somehow released from the melancholic grip of the lost
object, and future possibility opens up.
A third problem, pertaining more specifically to the difference
between Freudian mourning and Nietzschean convalescence, is that
the former is essentially a process of recathexis, of finding a new soci-
ality. In contrast, Nietzsche often seems to equate convalescence with
solitude, which suggests a potentially unbridgeable gap between Freud’s
social recathexis and Nietzsche’s apparently anti-social solitude. As a self-
proclaimed “posthumous” philosopher, Nietzsche overtly celebrates his
loneliness; however, for Nietzsche, convalescent solitude is meant more
as a negation of idealism, i.e., as a celebration of singularity, than of soli-
tude. Nietzsche, for example, can be found advocating types of marriage
and friendship which facilitate convalescence, and his well-known cri-
tique of German nationalism implies a concrete concern for the future
of society. Indeed, when he proclaims in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that
the earth shall be a place for convalescence, he seems to be implying the
possibility for new types of convalescent culture. Thus, if the valoriza-
tion of singularity is central, one might say that Nietzsche’s advocacy of
CONVALESCENCE AND MOURNING 47
convalescence within a broader de-idealizing critique of culture clearly

resembles Freud’s explicit linking of mourning to group psychology in
his later cultural texts.
Freud writes in his classic essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” that
mourning
is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some
abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty,
and ideal, and so on…The testing of reality, having shown that the loved
object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be with-
drawn from its attachments to this object. Against this demand a struggle
of course arises—it may be universally observed that man never willingly
abandons a libido-position, not even when a substitute is already beckon-
ing to him. This struggle can be so intense that a turning away from reality
ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory
wish-psychosis. The normal outcome is that deference for reality gains the
day. Nevertheless its behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now car-
ried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy,
while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind.
Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to
the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the
libido from it accomplished.8
There are several points to emphasize here. First, for Freud, conscious-
ness is embedded in affective sociality, i.e., the economy of libidinal
cathexis overly determines attention, expectation, and conscious life
generally speaking. Second, given this affective embeddedness, only
a concrete disruption—a new materiality—can lead to a shift in libido-
position. Since no one ever “willingly abandons a libido-position,” the
“bit-by-bit” recathexis of the work of mourning is the condition for the
possibility of a shift in thinking. Third, the loss at issue may concern his-
torically constituted abstractions and ideals which symbolically structure
society. Fourth, this loss, according to Freud, does not by any means
necessarily lead to mourning; in other words, the loss can be traumatic
and the object can by internalized, despite its material disappearance,
resulting in a delusional inability to bear the loss.
Nietzsche, of course, was one of the sources for Freud’s general view
on the material embeddedness of consciousness; one might think here,
for example, of Nietzsche’s characterization of the Pre-Socratic Greeks,
whose art is marked by their ability to bear their suffering, or the various
tracings of consciousness back to physiology, diet, climate, and political

history. If consciousness is grounded in historical materiality, then any
shift in thinking would only be possible by a shift within that concrete
materiality. This is perhaps made most clear in Ecce Homo, where the
emphasis on convalescence is most pronounced; here, Nietzsche remarks
that the long experience of the depths of sickness and recovery gave rise
to insights into the nuances of the range of perspectives and prepared
him for his “revaluations of all values.”9 Both Nietzschean convalescence
and Freudian mourning involve unavoidable loss or suffering, which in
bearing itself arrives at a new, concrete, salutary reorientation.
On this reading, then, convalescence is the gradual detachment from
socially enforced idealism which has been internalized. In other words, it
is a movement of de-idealization. He writes:
It was the ignorance in physiologicis—that damned “idealism”—that was

the real calamity in my life, totally superfluous and stupid, something of
which nothing good ever grew… my whole spiritual diet, including the
way I divided up my day, was completely senseless abuse of extraordinary
resources…I simply posited myself as equal to any nobody; it was a “self-
lessness,” an oblivion of all distance between myself and others that I shall
never forgive myself. When I was close to the end, because I was close to
the end, I began to reflect on this fundamental unreason of my life—this
“idealism.” Only my sickness brought me to reason.10
Nietzsche implies that convalescence entails de-idealization, a decathexis

from the various dimensions of the cultural superego—the demand of any
nobody—which mandates one’s entire spiritual diet, including how one
organizes one’s day. Idealism could thus be seen as the lingering manifes-
tation of the dead God, whose power structures sociality by enforcing the
equalization of all with any nobody and thus works to obliterate singular-
ity. In this context, the possibility of detachment from idealism embodied
in the convalescent coincides remarkably with the “bit-by-bit” process of
decathexis characteristic of mourning, especially in light of Freud’s desig-
nation of a cultural superego as the legacy of cultural melancholia.
For Nietzsche, this problem of idealism is equally cast as the problem
of ressentiment. Echoing the quote above, he writes: “Freedom from res-
sentiment, enlightenment about ressentiment—who knows how much I
am ultimately indebted, in this respect also, to my protracted sickness.”11
Ressentiment is not something that simply affects others which Nietzsche
diagnoses from afar. His performed de-idealizing critique is at the same
ZARATHUSTRA’S CONVALESCENCE 49
time the continuing, varied convalescence from his own ressentiment.12

Sickness provided the material moment which, by way of its embrace,
enables convalescence. Thus, Nietzsche’s much-emphasized exhorta-
tion to embrace necessity—in his notions of amor fati and Eternal
Recurrence—amount to more than mere Stoic acceptance, being rather
the key to convalescent becoming and overcoming. Against ressentiment,
he writes,
the sick person has only one great remedy: I call it Russian fatalism, that
fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, find-
ing a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer
to accept anything at all, no longer to take anything, no longer to absorb
anything—to cease reacting altogether…because one would use oneself up
to quickly if one reacted in any way, one does not react at all any more…
Nothing burns up faster than the affects of ressentiment. Anger, patho-
logical vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-
mixing in any sense—no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the
exhausted: such affects involve a rapid consumption of nervous energy…
Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick—it is their spe-
cific evil—unfortunately also their most natural inclination.13
Out of necessity, the exhausted person ceases to react, accepts her vulner-
ability, and ceases to waste nervous energy. Material necessity thus serves
to slowly break the convalescent away from idealism, i.e., pathological
habitualities fixed by culturally enforced investment of nervous energy.
The convalescent’s placement within a concrete site of crisis allows her
to bear the struggle between the pathology of ressentiment and conva-
lescence. Only the convalescent is given the time and place to confront
and slowly work-through her ressentiment by gradually detaching from it;
only the convalescent has a chance to slowly throw off the weight of his-
tory and begin again.
Zarathustra’s Convalescence
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche suggests that the entirety of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra is a dithyramb to convalescence; “I need solitude—which is
to say, convalescence, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, play-
ful air … My whole Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude…”.14 Recall
that for Freud, the work of mourning works on the multifarious libidinal
fixations which instantiate the position of the originally lost object. In

an analogous way, for Nietzsche, the convalescence from the Death of
God involves a sustained, painful decathexis from the self-hatred embod-
ied in our tendencies, habitualities, expectations, ideations, and so on.
Generally speaking, Nietzsche’s aphoristic style can be seen to follow
from this need to separate oneself at multiple levels, in multiple direc-
tions, again and again, from the weight of idealism which has infused
itself into us in the most labyrinthine ways. The portrayal of Zarathustra
as “the convalescent” shows the need for such a concrete, bit-by-bit,
struggle with ressentiment, as opposed to a mere shift in thinking or the
use of the proper method. On the cultural level, the fact that this conva-
lescence will be a slow process is underlined by the fact that most (i.e.,
the “good,” the “herd”) refuse to accept God’s death and thus live in a
chronic state of resentful fixation on idealism. Nonetheless, toward the
end of Part One, Zarathustra proclaims: “Verily a site of convalescence
(eine Stätte der Genesung) shall the earth yet become! And already a fra-
grance wafts about it, bringing health—and a new hope!”15
The convalescent is forced to bear her suffering patiently, painfully
rejecting cherished ideals while slowly awakening to new singular possi-
bilities which, devoid of libidinal investments, seem cold and depressing.
Indeed, returning to the lost idealism—even as delusion—would be warm
and comfortable, since it carries social recognition with it. This is to say
that the obliteration of singularity implicit in ressentiment is infused with
the herd’s warmth. Thus, Part Three of Zarathustra, which begins with
the section entitled “The Wanderer,” valorizes cold and loneliness. As he
climbs the mountain, Zarathustra praises “what hardens” and incites him-
self to “climb over” himself until even his “stars are under” him.16 It is
the confrontation with hard necessity that enables this “climbing over”
oneself, which can only be achieved through the work of concrete anti-
cathexis. This work breaks the enchanting, comfortable spell of culturally
sanctioned prejudices and ideals (“stars”), “pushing them down.” The
constitutive deferral of the completion of this process of convalescence
is testified to by Zarathustra’s coming to the mountain ridge and seeing
“the other sea lay spread out before him,” which rather than mark suc-
cess, initiates the “ultimate loneliness.” The mountain climber faces the
hardness of life without comforts and consolations, and when she finally
gains a view of “other seas,” they are still an unknown, cold distance
away. The main point is that this hardness is in fact the suffered ground
of consciousness and will, and as such, it will recur. The undergoing of
ZARATHUSTRA’S CONVALESCENCE 51
injury or loss is inevitable. The good, according to Zarathustra, suffer

injury and loss, but unable to bear it they flee into idealism—the demand
of “any nobody” which endows conformity with the group with absolute
value. The good who are encountered by Zarathustra cannot, for example,
move beyond their idealism—i.e., their herd-like moral judgment of his
atheistic nonconformity—to experience his singularity.
Zarathustra’s incitements to self-love can be seen as valorizations
of the convalescing self, as opposed to the self-love of the “sickly and
chronically ill,” who are incapable of convalescence, and whose self-love
“stinks.”17 Convalescent love is de-idealizing love, which seeks the love
object’s singularity. Thus, Zarathustra says, “O my soul, I took from
you all obeying, knee-bending, and ‘Lord’-saying; I myself gave you the
name ‘Turning of Need’ and ‘Fate’ … now there is nowhere a soul that
would be more loving and more comprehensive and encompassing…”.18
Zarathustra’s gradual anti-cathexis from God (along with the diversity of
socially sanctioned substitute idols) could thus be seen as a type of work-
ing-through, which does not fixate on a new idealism, but rather is able
to bear its suffered vulnerability and thereby open up the love of singu-
larity. Zarathustra’s naming of his soul “Turning of need” and “Fate” is
the effect of the prolonged confrontation with hard necessity (evident in
solitude, patient wandering, for example) which has worked on his inter-
nalization of herd needs to open up the future. A concretely open future,
one might say, guides and is the result of successful convalescence. In
contrast, the good “crucify all human future … [they] have always been
the beginning of the end”; the good crucify man’s future on their ideal
of socially enforced propriety, thus foreclosing the possibility of concrete
amelioration.19
The section entitled “The Convalescent” depicts the concrete strug-
gle of de-idealization, i.e., the withdrawal of libido from culturally shared
episteme. For 7 days, Zarathustra convalesces from the violence of the
injury sustained during the violent confrontation with his “most abysmal
thought”: Eternal Recurrence. This confrontation signals the disruption
of Zarathustra’s own ressentiment; his desires to teach men, to lead, to
be followed, to prepare the way for the Overman all crash on the rocks
of material necessity. Zarathustra, like any moralist, suffers the world and
longs to change it; but, unlike the moralist, he is able to bear the loss of
his cherished ideals, which prepares the way for concrete renewal.
As in the demon’s announcement in Gay Science, Eternal Recurrence
appears only to the convalescent in its paradoxical allure—the good are
repulsed by it, whereas the convalescent will see it as absolute.20 Eternal

Recurrence articulates the site of convalescence where ressentiment
encounters itself within concrete undergoing, posing the question as to
whether one will embrace one’s singularity or give into self-hatred by
fleeing into the readymade idealism of the group. To convalesce is to
love what cannot be loved, in a salutary manner: to love one’s injury,
one’s pain; to love even “the herd”—this love amounts to a transforma-
tive, suffered reinterpretation of idealism which immanently contests res-
sentiment; thus, Zarathustra needs to be redeemed from his nausea over
the rabble. Eternal Recurrence can thus be said to be the concrete site of
Zarathustra’s de-idealizing love of humanity.
The activity of Zarathustra’s animals is clearly essential in this section,
and the question arises as to what role these animals are playing in this
symbolic economy. Are they not speaking as a dimension of Zarathustra’s
own psyche—as symbols of his own animality, of his own materiality?
When he begins to beckon his most abysmal thought—that of Eternal
Recurrence—his animals approach him frightfully; What do they make
of Zarathustra, this resentful animal at war with himself, screaming at
himself, disgusted with himself? As he convalesces, his animals stay by his
side, and it is they who address Zarathustra after 7 days, beckoning him
to leave the cave and go out into the world. They remark: “All things
would be your physicians.”21 They thus advocate the slow process of
coming to love necessity. Portrayed in their materiality rather than episte-
mologically, things themselves offer a renewed libidinal cathexis to displace
the fixated libidinal investment in the cultural superego.
Zarathustra responds by asking them to continue to banter, because
he likes the distraction, the illusion created by sounds: “Are things not
furnished with names and tones so that human beings might refresh
themselves with things? It is a beautiful foolery, this speaking: with it
human beings can dance over things.”22 Tired of the pain of his con-
frontation with necessity, Zarathustra now seeks an escape in the form of
the soothing enchantment of banter. The animals, however, immediately
reject this maniacal response, asserting that “for those who think as we
do all things are already dancing: they come and shake hands and laugh
and flee—and come back again.”23 The things themselves, they repeat,
will heal Zarathustra, in their erotic dance in which they come and go—
offering a concrete recathexis in place of his ressentiment.
Zarathustra will have none of the sober straight talk from his ani-
mals, and he refuses their call on him to mournfully re-cathectic with
ABSTRACTION IN POPULAR READINGS … 53
the things themselves: “Oh you pranksters and barrel organs!” he says,
“… have you simply made a hurdy-gurdy song of it all? But now I lie
here, still weary … sick from my own redemption … And you simply
watched all this! O my animals, are you, too, cruel?”24 Zarathustra thus
absurdly accuses the animals of taking pleasure in his loss, projecting his
own human ressentiment onto them. In misunderstanding his animals,
Zarathustra thus betrays a disgust for his own animality—which appears
to be petty, superfluous. Zarathustra’s own deafness to his animals tes-
tifies to the convalescent’s struggle with the Judeo-Christian idealism
which labels the animal as base in comparison with the grandness of
human morality and the culture of ressentiment.
But then, Nietzsche explains, Zarathustra’s animals would not let him
go on. They demanded that he stop speaking, leave his cave, and go out
into the world. His own animality then resists the resentful judgment
of itself, by demanding that he recathect with the world by learning to
sing from the songbirds. They tell him: “For your animals know well, O
Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are the teacher of
the eternal recurrence—that is now your fate! That you must be the first to
teach this teaching—how should this great fate not be your greatest dan-
ger and sickness too?”25 His animals thus remind him that to learn and
teach the eternal recurrence is to suffer it; it is not merely a concept, doc-
trine, imperative, but the suffered loss of one’s socialized attachment to
the herd, which demands a simultaneous reinvestment of love into “things
themselves.” What recurs eternally is the concretely undergone juncture
between convalescence and ressentiment. Zarathustra’s refusal to go out
into the world and the simultaneous disgust with his own animality are
symptomatic of the resentful. Yet, if the animals are a part of Zarathustra
himself—i.e., if the conversation between Zarathustra and his animals is an
allegory of de-idealizing convalescence—then their resistance to his own
resentful demands testifies to the work of convalescence, their voices call-
ing for and provoking the recathexis with the world.
Abstraction in Popular Readings of Nietzsche:

Derrida and Deleuze
As indicated, for Derrida, Nietzsche is a thinker of différance.

Nietzsche’s varied criticisms of Socrates, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer,
Hegel, and others amount to deconstructions of various forms of the
metaphysics of presence—Socratic questioning, Platonic Truth, the
categorical imperative, Will, Spirit, God, etc. In Spurs, Derrida shows

how Nietzsche’s styles performatively carry out this critique of the meta-
physics of presence. Derrida argues that the dual usage of style, to attack
and protect, corresponds to the duality of masculine and feminine. Style
“perforates even as it parries”; it is both a sharp, cleaving point that
leaves its mark and the protective resistance of the “sails and veils” which
enfold the point. It is on the basis of this trope of the ambiguity of style
that Nietzsche’s text is opened up.
Derrida approaches Section 60 of Nietzsche’s Gay Science in terms
of the spur (see note 5). One must note that this term points implic-
itly to Heidegger’s “Anaximander Fragment” which is fundamental for
Derrida’s thinking of the trace or Spur.26 The rocky shore, the writer’s
feet lapped by the waves, and the ship’s gliding in the distance are to
be understood as spurs—sharp, cleaving points that leave their marks,
enfolded by the protective resistance of their own types of sails or veils.
For Derrida, Nietzsche’s use of the sailing ship to symbolize women
“serves as a sort of warning to us to keep our distance from these mul-
tifarious veils and their shadowy dream of death.”27 The spurs styles
of the ship—of women—work at a distance and can only do so. Thus,
Nietzsche’s thought, according to Derrida, is a call to protect us from
succumbing to seduction, as well as a call for us to succumb to it, in the
only way possible—that is, to keep our distance. He writes: “Not only
for protection … against the spell of her fascination, but also as a way of
succumbing to it, that distance … is necessary.”28
The reason, according to Derrida, that distance is necessary is
perhaps because the “woman” is not a determinable identity. Perhaps

woman is not some thing which announces itself from a distance, at a
distance from some other thing. In that case it would not be a matter of
retreat and approach. Perhaps woman—a non-identity, a non-figure, a
simulacrum—is distance’s very chasm, the out-distancing of distance, the
interval’s cadence, distance itself, if we could still say such a thing, distance
itself.29
Here, Derrida claims that he is “forced to appeal” to Heidegger’s onto-

logical notion of Entfernung to do justice to Nietzsche’s thinking of
distance.30 Heidegger eschewed any distinction between subject and
object as being tainted by a too rigid and simplistic equation of Being
and presence; he thus articulates a performative account of criticism—or
“questioning” as he puts it—that arises as an “event,” a “happening,”

which is expressed in a middle voice between subject and object. For
Derrida, drawing on Heidegger, woman, or truth, is not simply a self-
identical thing, to be approached, determinately known, and possessed;
rather, “out of the depths, endless and unfathomable, she engulfs and
distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property.”31 Thus, the
distancing action of woman implicit in style would serve as the cen-
tral—and, for Derrida, Heideggerian—theme of Nietzsche’s writing of
the untruth of truth. Woman marks the impossibility of a mastery which
is claimed by philosophy, which founders “on these shoals and is hurled
down these depthless depths to its ruin.”32
Derrida situates this meditation on distance within a polemic against
the claim of philosophical mastery made by “credulous and dogmatic”
philosophers. He writes that “in its maneuvers distance strips the lady of
her identity and unseats the philosopher knight.”33 If the problem lies
with the credulity and dogma of certain philosophers, the possibility lies
open for a non-dogmatic, non-credulous, non-essentializing philosopher
who has an understanding of women, i.e., who has style. When such a
philosopher writes, he or she carries out the play of untruth within lan-
guage, i.e., within a regime or logic of truth dominated by the meta-
physics of presence. The key point here is that Derrida’s Nietzsche is a
thinker or writer with certain traits—a sense of woman, of style, of dis-
tance: “Nietzsche’s writing is an inscription of the truth. And such
an inscription, even if we do not venture so far as to call it the femi-
nine itself, is indeed the feminine ‘operation.’”34 Here, Derrida attrib-
utes the misogyny of the philosopher to subjective dispositions; they are
credulous, dogmatic, essentializing in their imposition of identity onto
woman, who is better understood in her distancing action, in her resist-
ance to being essentialized. In contrast, Derrida claims that Nietzsche’s
writing is an inscription of the feminine operation, which suggests that
the latter opens up a site for the event of distancing; Nietzsche, by means
of his styles and the diagnosis of style in general, thus keeps his distance
in contrast to the clumsy violent philosopher.
With the previous analysis of convalescence in mind, one might ini-
tially point out that Derrida begs the question as to how the credulous,
dogmatic philosopher could acquire style and gain sensibility to the femi-
nine operation. How did the philosopher become so dull and violent in
the first place? How did the metaphysics of presence claim him or her,
and how did Nietzsche develop his stylistic love of truth as woman? To
put it simply, Nietzsche’s appeal to the historical character of ressentiment

and to convalescence is meant to answer such questions, whereas Derrida
seems content to simply contrast the oblivious philosopher to the writer
of différance. Nietzsche explicitly attributes the subtlety of his thinking
and style to the painful ordeals of his varied convalescences, because only
convalescence—the slow bearing of one’s suffering, which can be objec-
tively facilitated or thwarted—is the overcoming of ressentiment. This is
to say that convalescence is the condition of possibility of the sensibility
Derrida valorizes.
This is clear from a closer analysis of the passage in question—
Section 60 of Gay Science—where the fundamental issue is not truth—or
even the untruth of truth—but rather the intimate relationship between
suffering and idealism. Dreams are a form of unbearable suffering; in
fantasy, one would glide over life as in a distant sailboat and escape the
pain and noise of undergoing. And, one must be clear that Nietzsche
raises the issue of fantasy’s being marked by suffering prior to the intro-
duction of the theme of women, who represent the prototypical male
fantasy. The women at stake here are the fantasies of suffering men who
wish to escape from their own concrete powerlessness, and these fanta-
sized women are expressive of an imaginative power in which “even the
loudest surf turns into deathly quiet, and life itself into a dream about
life.”35 The human power of idealization which turns life itself into
a dream about life arises with and as the suffering of a violence which
makes “the hearts of even these weather-beaten rocky monsters [trem-
ble] in their bodies.”36
At the end of this passage, Nietzsche reminds the “noble enthusiast”
that even “on the most beautiful sailboat” there is “a lot of noise, and
unfortunately much small and petty noise.” In other words, Nietzsche
exhorts the dreamer to an awareness of the suffered material condition
of possibility of the dream and to acknowledge the inescapability of
noise, pain, and suffering. There may be a legitimate question here as
to whether there is a trace of misogyny in Nietzsche’s qualifiers, “small
and petty,” meant to characterize the concrete encounters with women.
However, if the encounter with women is meant to be exemplary of the
problem of idealization generally speaking, then does not the “small and
petty” rather refer to the undergoing of de-idealized love itself, i.e., the
simply material encounter between concrete beings devoid of the affec-
tively charged, socially sanctioned prejudice with which it is usually
infused? Since idealism is infused with magical, fetishized social value,
de-idealizing encounters with others necessarily seem small and petty,

and the healthy love that Nietzsche valorizes is precisely the sensibility
to and the ability to embrace the seemingly small and petty. The singular
necessarily appears small and petty, and convalescence is the process of
becoming accustomed to the small and petty. Nietzsche is reminding the
dreamer that the dream is constitutively unattainable, and as such, it is
a form of the inability to bear one’s own suffering, i.e., the inability to
convalesce.
Derrida’s Spurs is to some extent an attempt to defend Nietzsche
against the charge that he was a crude misogynist. Drawing on
Nietzsche’s claim that “truth is a woman,” Derrida shows that the target
of Nietzsche’s criticism is the dogmatic and credulous male philosopher
who has no understanding of either truth or women. Derrida thus sug-
gests an interpretation of misogyny as a manifestation of the metaphys-
ics of presence which he sees as the essence of the tradition of Western,
male-dominated philosophy. In so far as Nietzsche’s writing disrupts this
tradition, it can serve as a resource for the deconstruction of misogyny.
While I generally agree with this point, Derrida’s analysis nonetheless
abstracts from the suffered character of idealism. Misogyny is not simply
spread by dogmatic metaphysicians of presence, but concretely enforced
by a coercive culture which ostracizes non-conformists. For example, the
love of parents can be dependent on the internalization of the norms
that are dear to those parents; a feminist subject—male or female—may
thus suffer the concrete choice between either internalizing self-hatred in
the form of misogynist parental norms or facing the loss of parental love.
Nietzsche can help us to conceptualize what life is like within the coer-
cion of socially sanctioned norms for a subject who is struggling for sin-
gularity. The entire discourse on convalescence, along with the emphasis
on the need to climb cold mountain peaks, seek solitude, and embrace
chance should be read through this problematic. Judith Butler’s valoriza-
tion of risk in The Psychic Life of Power seems to point in this direction,
although she makes no explicit reference to Nietzschean convalescence.37
In the Preface to the Second Edition of Gay Science, Nietzsche explic-
itly claims that the text was born from convalescence. He writes that in
this text,
gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened—

the gratitude of a convalescent [die Dankbarkeit eines Genesenden]—for
convalescence was unexpected. “Gay Science”: that signifies the saturnalia
of the spirit who has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure—patiently,

severely, coldly, without submitting, but also without hope—and who is
now all at once attacked by hope, the hope for health, and the intoxication
of convalescence…This whole book is nothing but a bit of merry-making
after long privation and powerlessness, the rejoicing of strength that is
returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomor-
row, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adven-
tures, of seas that are open again, of goals that are permitted again. And
what did not lie behind me then! This stretch of desert, exhaustion, disbe-
lief, icing up in the midst of youth, this interlude of old age at the wrong
time, this tyranny of pain even excelled by the tyranny of pride that refused
the conclusions of pain…38
Nietzsche locates the origin of the text within the precarious, concrete
struggle of convalescence. The latter is thus explicitly designated as the
condition of possibility of merrymaking, i.e., the dance, play, and laugh-
ter upon which Derrida—as well as Deleuze—ground their readings,
arises from conditions of possibility which those thinkers occlude from
their accounts of Nietzsche. For the latter, only the borne suffering of
the convalescent could enact the sought-after cultural renewal; without
such convalescence, one hears only the manic laughter of ressentiment.
For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s philosophy diagnoses the symptoms of forces:
“Phenomena, things, organisms, societies, consciousness and spirits
are signs, or rather symptoms, and themselves reflect states of forces.”39
These forces are further divided into types, primarily either reactive or
active. This then allows an account of the ethical, which asks not “what”
and “why,” but rather “who” and “what type” of person or community
is capable of saying or doing this.40 Deleuze explains that this typology of
persons and groups can be thus reduced to a topography of forces, expres-
sive of the will to power. He writes: “Genealogical means differential and
genetic. The will to power is the differential element of forces, that is to
say the element that produces the differences in quantity between two or
more…”.41 In contrast to the Hegelian dialectician—who sees only the
contradictions of thought—the Nietzschean genealogist attends to the sub-
terranean ground of forces which produce thought.
On this reading, metaphysics is the symptom of a nihilism produced
from the victory of reactive forces. Importantly, though, this victory
implies the forgottenness of the very forces which have given rise to the
symptom; the metaphysician is oblivious to the very nihilism which
produces metaphysics. In contrast, Nietzsche offers a “new image of
thought” which not only grasps its own essence as the will to power, but
in so doing necessarily transmutates the reactive will to power into activ-
ity. Deleuze calls this transmutation, “affirmation.” He writes: “Nihilism
expresses the quality of the negative as ratio cognoscendi of the will to
power; but it cannot be brought to completion without transmuting
itself into the opposite quality, into affirmation as ratio essendi of that
same will.”42 Thus, according to Deleuze, nihilism completes itself by
inspiring “in man a new inclination: for destroying himself, but destroy-
ing himself actively.”43
Deleuze appeals to the “moment” of transmutation, or affirma-
tion, which ultimately arises from the differential character of the will
to power. However, with our discussion of convalescence continually
in mind, one cannot help but conclude that Deleuze—like Derrida—
occludes the essential element of suffering in Nietzsche in favor of
an appeal to a sort of abstract animism: Although the will to power is
non-atomistic, non-egoistic, pluralistic, and differential, to attribute
the overcoming of nihilism to a “moment” of affirmation is abstraction
nonetheless. One must contrast this with convalescent working-through:
The socio-historically embedded bearing of suffering cannot be fixed to
a “point” or “moment” of transmutation or conversion. The objective,
ambivalent, temporal character of this concrete struggle is essential; To
decathect, rehabituate, and retrain one’s inclinations and sensibilities
away from the weightiness imposed by nihilistic culture can only be con-
ceived as a work. Deleuze’s reading has the merit of showing the radical-
ity of Nietzsche’s genealogical model of thinking, which illuminates the
type and location of thought. Nonetheless, the fact that it interprets the
will to power as an, albeit differential, ontology of forces occludes reflec-
tion on the suffered dimensions of ressentiment and convalescence; this
threatens to reduce amelioration to a spontaneous moment of creation,
rather than as a suffered, gradual, detachment from the cultural norms
implicit in the subject.
Like Derrida, Deleuze explicitly appeals to Heidegger when trying to
clarify what he means by “affirmation.” He writes: “We are awaiting the
forces capable of making thought something active … thinking, like activ-
ity, is always … an extraordinary event in thought itself, for thought itself
… Violence must be done to it as thought, a power, the force of thinking,
must throw it into a becoming-active…”.44 Drawing upon Heidegger’s
appeal for a reticent openness for the event of Being, Deleuze portrays
Nietzschean affirmation as a rupture of historical forgottenness, which
intrudes into thought. Like Derrida, Deleuze explicitly appeals to the

tropes of “play,” “laughter,” and “dance” to characterize affirmation. He
writes: “The trinity of dance, play and laughter creates the transubstantia-
tion of nothingness, the transmutation of the negative and the transvalua-
tion or change of power of negation.”45 As I have suggested, though, such
claims ignore Nietzsche’s own testimony that thinking as dance or play is
the suffered achievement of the convalescent, the result of often painful,
cold convalescence which is asserted as the concrete condition of possibil-
ity of any event of thinking.
Nietzsche does not diagnose ressentiment in terms of a “forgetting of
origins.” Such a diagnosis transparently amounts to idealism: How can
concrete, suffered, social origins simply be “forgotten”? To claim this
is to occlude the weighty social character of idealism into which we are
concretely socialized. For Nietzsche, history has left deep scars on us and
barriers around us—in our flesh, habitualities, thinking, institutions, and
language—which concretely enforce the “forgetting” of that history. Thus,
Nietzsche asserts the need to convalesce, to gradually work-through, and
to bear the suffering unacknowledged by idealism. More than a moment
of revelation or transgressive affirmation, convalescence is an ongoing
ordeal which is facilitated and thwarted by one’s social environments and
the relative distance one can get from the culture of ressentiment.
In reflecting on his life of convalescence, Nietzsche claims that it was
precisely the concrete process of confronting the “conclusions of pain”
that forged his convalescent sensibility. He writes:
After such self-questioning, self-temptation, one acquires a subtler eye for

all philosophizing to date; one can infer better than before the involuntary
detours, side lanes, resting places, and sunny places of thought to which suf-
fering thinkers are led and misled on account of their suffering; for now one
knows whether the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and
lure the spirit—toward the sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm
in some sense. Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with
a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows
some finale, some final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or
religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the ques-
tion whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher.46
One might be tempted to see in such comments the affirmation of

what Derrida calls the “feminine operation” which resists and under-
girds the credulity of the dogmatic philosopher who longs for some sort
of finale, Apart, Beyond, Outside—i.e., some sort of Truth. However,

the language of “text,” “untruth,” “deferral,” “différance,” and so on
remains abstracted from the suffered character of Nietzsche’s thinking.
The difference between convalescence and the resentful longing for
a Beyond does not lie merely in a subjective disposition—“skeptical,”
“nondogmatic,” or “stylistic”—but rather takes place within a site of
suffered sociality. Convalescence, as the acceptance of the eternal return
of suffering, is the performed process of bearing one’s singular suffer-
ing. Culturally speaking, this would mean the dissolution of the fixa-
tion produced by the dominant legacy of the monolithic culture of
ressentiment, in which the subject becomes “any Nobody.” In other
words, for Nietzsche, suffering and thinking are co-primordial—idealist
thinking is suffering which is regulated by cultures of self-hatred; con-
valescent thinking is suffering which has the time and place to slowly
work-through itself, and in so doing, it is able to bear its singularity
and confront the new. Only in this way is the future opened up, and
one is able to suffer again, rather than adopting the readymade, socially
enforced culture of ressentiment. Nietzsche writes:
We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do…
we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain…Only great pain,
the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were,
with green wood—compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate
depths and to put aside all … things in which formerly we may have found
our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better”; but I know that
it makes us more profound…out of such long and dangerous exercises of
self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few more question
marks—above all with the will henceforth to question further, more deeply,
severely, harshly, evilly and quietly than one had questioned heretofore…47
If unbearable suffering is the essence of ressentiment, in convalescence,

suffering bears itself “descending into depths” and the “putting aside”
of prejudice. The convalescent bears and works-through her overwhelm-
ing vulnerability, mournfully undergoing the limit of what had appeared
absolute, compelled to “to put aside all … things in which formerly we
may have found our humanity.”
More recent discussion of what I have called the “culture” of ressenti-
ment can be found in the respective work of Wendy Brown and Lauren
Berlant.48 Brown draws explicitly on Nietzsche to articulate the self-
defeating structure of social movements guided by ressentiment. She
writes; “Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself,
only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in
politics; it can hold out no future—for itself or others—that triumphs
over this pain.”49 Similarly, Berlant criticizes the “national sentimental-
ity” which she sees as the basis of identity politics in the United States.
Berlant writes: “In the sentimental national contract, antagonists mirror
each other in their conviction about the self-evidence and objectivity of
painful feeling, and about the nation’s duty to eradicate it.”50 Thus, poli-
tics becomes a seemingly endless screaming match between those who
seek redemption for the past suffering of their group. For both Brown
and Berlant, the imperative to overcome this culture of ressentiment
lies in the fact that it is an ineffective political strategy for marginalized
groups. As Berlant puts it, “… they so frequently make ethical a refusal
to counter the customary and structural violences of social life, which are
deemed somehow extraneous in the face of pain’s claims.”51
Largely because she reads Nietzsche solely through his notion of
will to power, Brown finds no resources in Nietzsche to help clarify the
overcoming of ressentiment. Instead, she suggests “reopening a desire
for futurity” by using political language in such a way as to deconstruct
identity: “the subject understood as an effect of an (ongoing) geneal-
ogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive of, fulfilling, or
frustrating desire, is in this way revealed as neither sovereign nor con-
clusive even as it is affirmed as a ‘I.’”52 Similarly, Berlant speaks of an
“imperative to place at risk the sense of belonging that national senti-
mentality promises,” and calls for “new vocabularies” and “new maps.”53
Certainly, using language in new ways to disrupt the institutionalization
of ressentiment within the symbolic order is essential, but Nietzsche helps
us understand how subjects who identify with the shared sentimentality
of their marginalized group could come to use language in new ways.
Both Brown and Berlant focus on the pernicious ideology of suffering at
the expense of a detailed analysis of the subject’s experience of the social
and of the way in which that experience is imbricated in the question
as to whether or not, and to what extent, that subject will be able to
bear the loss of its absorption into the group’s sentimentality. The con-
valescent subject slowly, painfully suffers her separation from the group’s
ressentiment and thus needs support in alternative forms of sociality
which could facilitate convalescence. As Nietzsche points out, there are
severe social consequences for rejecting the shared sentimentality of the
group; overcoming ressentiment often involves making those we love
suffer, because that ressentiment is what we have in common, having

assumed a shared identity in accord with the legacy of culturally obliga-
tory self-hatred. From this perspective, the ability to convalescence—i.e.,
the ability to bear one’s singularity in the midst of the social pressure to
renounce it—would be the condition for the possibility of opening up
the future, with a new language and new maps of our sociality.
There is thus a sense in which convalescence can be socially thwarted
or facilitated; the crisis lies within the concretely suffered question as
to whether suffering has the time, place, and sociality to bear itself, as
opposed to being dominated and thus preempted by coercive sociality.
Although Nietzsche primarily located this coercion within the legacy of
Christian morality—which he found to structure even our language—
as a more contemporary example one might think of the totalitarian
structure of what Adorno and Horkheimer call “the culture indus-
try”—its virtual omnipresence, backed by the traumatizing force of capi-
tal—enforces a culture of sameness. Such sameness is indicative of what
Nietzsche calls that “damned idealism” which deprives one of one’s suf-
fered singularity and shapes one into “any Nobody,” who—as Adorno
puts it—has been deprived of the capacity to experience.
The convalescent needs time and place, apart from dominant social
fetishism, to endure and negotiate the rupture, internal and exter-
nal. This would be the antidote for ressentiment. In ressentiment, one’s
suffered socio-historical materiality is undergone or interpreted as an
unbearable horror. This interpretation, for Nietzsche, always has several
dimensions—a real more or less traumatic dimension (in slavery, loss of
prehistory, and taking on social straightjacket by force, for example), a
physiological dimension (in diet, climate, and weakness, for example),
and an interpretive, cultural dimension (in the ascetic ideal, Christianity,
morality, for example). Genealogy is the convalescent’s revisiting of the
scene of the reproduction of ressentiment. Convalescence is the counter-
scene or counter-position; it is a repetition of the primal scenes of the
origin of humanity for Nietzsche, but sheltered from the traumatic shock
and noise of culture. The Russian soldier lays in the snow; the convales-
cent lays in bed, unable to participate in fetishized social rituals, alone
with his or her pain which guides and ruptures reflection. Reflection
thereby finds itself bearing its conditions of possibility, finding itself
powerless in the face of an objectivity which heals, sickens, builds, and
destroys that which is reflection’s object.
Nietzsche’s notion of convalescence is thus not simply concerned

with revealing constitutive indeterminacies of meaning, but rather with
the confrontation of thinking with its own suffered basis. Convalescence
marks the embrace of the suffering which sustains and has sustained
thinking all along, thus opening up the possibility of concrete ameliora-
tion. Suffering is not a concept or ideal and cannot be deconstructed. It
is rather the condition for the possibility of deconstruction and simul-
taneously of dogma and credulity—which are enabled by a more or less
traumatic obliteration of the subject’s ability to bear its singular suffer-
ings within concrete social life.
For Nietzsche, wisdom arises from the “ability”—understand subjec-
tively and objectively, individually, and culturally—to embrace our vul-
nerability, to bear what happens to us and what has been made of us, so
that we may live again. One must thus envision the creation of cultures
of convalescence, which give the time and place for the working-through
of suffering, creating new forms of sociality in which we facilitate one
another in confronting our singular sufferings. In the midst of the histor-
ical dominance of cultures of ressentiment which provide one obligatory,
self-denying meaning for human suffering, such convalescent socialities
would facilitate greater sensibility to singularities of vulnerability.
Notes
1. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-
Webster, 1986), 496.
2. See David Allison’s influential anthology, The New Nietzsche.
3. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” 396–420.
4. Ibid., 409.
5. Ibid., 411.
6. Ibid., 419.
7. A related approach to Nietzsche is suggested by Robert Pippen, who
explicitly appeals to Freud in his analysis of Nietzsche as a thinker of
modern melancholy. However, Pippin does not consider Nietzsche’s dis-
cussion of convalescence and argues that Nietzsche fails to offer a cred-
ible account of the possibility of overcoming the melancholia he correctly
diagnoses. See Robert B. Pippin, “Nietzsche and the Melancholy of
Modernity,” 495–520.
8. Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, 14, 244–245.
9. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, 223.
NOTES 65
10. Ibid., 241.
11. Ibid., 229.
12. My account contrasts with that of Herman Siemens who argues that
Nietzsche can only overcome ressentiment—which continually threatens
to return—by using an “agonal discourse,” which “means what it says,
but also works as a code for the body in action … it becomes a metaphor
of the body in extreme, violent agitation, the transference of an affec-
tive engagement bound by an agonal economy of energy.” See Siemens,
“Nietzsche’s agon with ressentiment: towards a therapeutic reading of
critical transvaluation,” 83. According to Siemens, this agonal “model”
works by self-consciously exposing ressentiment to opposing forces, thus
contesting it. Nietzsche’s potentially resentful diatribe against resent-
ment, for example, is kept in check by opposing itself with other posi-
tions. The agonal relation to opposing forces transforms the force of
ressentiment into active contestation. However, this account, on my read-
ing, does not get at the materiality of Nietzsche’s text, reifying the work
of convalescence into the notion of an agonal “model.” What is missing is
the concrete moment of vulnerability which Nietzsche explicitly traces to
the heart of both ressentiment and convalescence.
13. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, 230.
14. Ibid., 234. I have replaced Kaufmann’s translation of Genesung as “recov-
ery” with “convalescence.”
15. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Graham Parkes, 67.
16. Ibid., 131.
17. Ibid., 167.
18. Ibid., 194–195.
19. Ibid., 186.
20. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Translated by Walter Kaufman, 273.
21. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 189.
22. Ibid., 190.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 192.
26. Derrida, “Différance,” 417.
27. Derrida, Spurs, 49.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. This appeal to Heidegger is indicative of Derrida’s de-materialization of
Nietzsche. While Derrida acknowledges the positing of a certain unques-
tioned valuation of the proper in Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit,
for example, he also sees moments in Heidegger which seem to avow the
“abyssal structure” of propriation. The main example given is of Ereignis,
which having been uprooted from ontology captures the “unfathomable

process” of the event. Derrida wonders whether, at such moments, there
is not a compatibility between Heidegger and Nietzsche: “Perhaps truth’s
abyss as non-truth, propriation as appropriation/a-propriation, the decla-
ration become parodying dissimulation, perhaps this is what Nietzsche is
calling the style’s form and the no-where of woman.” See Derrida, Spurs,
121. However, Heidegger’s thinking of propriation as appropriation is
clearly devoid of the materiality essential to Nietzschean convalescence.
Indeed, Heidegger takes pains to purify his thinking of any reference to
need and the concrete. Of fundamental questioning, for example, he writes
that it does not “lie in the sphere of urgent concern and the satisfaction
of dominant needs. The questioning itself is out-of-order. It is com-
pletely voluntary [freiwillige], fully and especially based on the mysterious
ground of freedom, on what we have called the leap.” See Heidegger,
Introduction to Metaphysics, 14. On our reading, Heidegger’s apparent
opposition between need and freewill is precisely what Nietzsche’s reflec-
tion on suffered, social histories seeks to undermine.
31. See Derrida, Spurs, 51.
32. Ibid., 53.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 59.
35. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 123.
36. Ibid.
37. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 29. She writes: “The subject is
compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but that repe-
tition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm
‘in the right way,’ one becomes subject to further sanction, one feels the
prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And, yet, without a repeti-
tion that risks life—in its current organization—how might we begin to
imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively recon-
figure the contours of the conditions of life?” Notably, however, she fails
to interrogate the concrete socio-historical conditions for the possibility
of the subjective action—i.e., risk-taking—that she valorizes. This criti-
cism of Butler is developed a bit further in chapters six and seven.
39. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, x.
40. Ibid., 105. Deleuze writes, for example: “…typology begins with a topol-
ogy. It is a matter of knowing what region such errors and such truths
belong to, what their type is, which one formulates and conceives them…”.
41. Ibid., 52.
42. Ibid., 173.
43. Ibid., 174.
NOTES 67
44. Ibid., 108.
45. Ibid., 176.
47. Ibid., 36.
48. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity,
and Lauren Berlant, “The subject of true feeling: Pain, privacy and poli-
tics”.
49. Brown, 74.
50. Berlant, 45.
51. Ibid.
52. Brown, 75.
53. Berlant, 45.
CHAPTER 3
Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy

of the Subject
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality transcends classification as

“moral theory” and can be read as an interrogation of and encounter
with the suffered sociality of subjectivity. In Chap. 2, this interrogation
and encounter are read through a comparison between Nietzschean con-
valescence and Freudian mourning. From this perspective, the human is
situated within historical life on the edge of its epistemological and prag-
matic capacities, and history is a sort of suffered ordeal of negotiating
this excess. Our exposure to the excessive is the historical locus of the
formation of personality and society; if we are able to work-through it,
it may be the stimulus for transformation and renewal; if not, if we are
scarred or traumatized, it could be seen as the source of a fixated oblit-
eration of ourselves and our socialities.
Many theorists have recognized a shift in Freud’s later thinking
away from the early psychoanalytic model—which appeals to energet-
ics, drives, and repression—toward a more relational psychoanalytic
model.1 The latter understands personhood through its suffered social-
ity and the more or less traumatic loss of its meaningful relationships,
instead of relying on appeals to energy, pressure, repression, and other
metaphysical concepts. Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott (who will be dis-
cussed in Chap. 5), and other theorists are notable for their theoretical
extension of this relational model. One might note that the philosopher

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6_3
70 3 RELATIONALITY, TRAUMA, AND THE GENEALOGY OF THE SUBJECT
Axel Honneth integrates this later psychoanalytic paradigm into his criti-
cal theory of liberation.2
In a very basic way, this psychoanalytic shift toward relationality can
be used for a reading of Nietzsche’s essay that offers a more coherent
account of the suffered histories at stake in the emergence of slave moral-
ity, the reproduction of bad conscience and its amelioration, and the
proliferation of the ascetic ideal. Like Freud, Nietzsche often uses meta-
physical language, and the proto-psychoanalytic character of the language
in Genealogy and other works is remarkable. For example, in the second
essay, Nietzsche suggests that the imposition of social constraints on our
prehistoric ancestors forced the inversion of their animal instincts which
produced the bad conscience. Given the way this corresponds with aspects
of Freud’s account of repression, neurosis, and the formation of the super-
ego, it is reasonable to infer that Freud was influenced by the essay. That
said, drawing on the relational model of psychoanalysis helps to clarify
the suffered situatedness implied by appeals to such psychical mecha-
nisms. Central to the thesis of this book is the idea that there are aspects
of Nietzsche’s own texts—in explorations of the lived social dimensions of
ressentiment, for example—that prefigure this relational model.
Psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell describes relational psychoanalysis as a
theory in which humans
…are portrayed not as a conglomeration of physically based urges, but

as being shaped by and inevitably embedded within a matrix of relation-
ships with other people, struggling both to maintain our ties to others and
to differentiate ourselves from them…the basic unit of study is not the
individual as a separate entity whose desires clash with an external reality,
but an interactional field within which the individual arises and struggles
to make contact and to articulate himself…the person is comprehensible
only within this tapestry of relationships, past and present. Analytic inquiry
entails a participation in, and an observation, uncovering, and transforma-
tion of, these relationships and their internal representations…3
In his later thinking, Freud articulates a genealogy of conscience (the

ego ideal or superego) that suggests its relational history: Conscience is
the symptom of the melancholic response to the loss of the parent–child
relationship. The trauma of losing our childhood and parental care pro-
duces a conscience as a defense mechanism by which I internalize the
parental voice and feel its pressure as an attempt to maintain the love of
3 RELATIONALITY, TRAUMA, AND THE GENEALOGY OF THE SUBJECT 71
the parents, i.e., an unconscious masochism arises which demands con-

formity in exchange for a feeling of security. Thus, conscience might be
seen as a symptom of our suffered social histories.
For Freud, a symptom has a sense relating to an individual’s history.4
This source, Freud suggests, is not a positive, naturalistically conceived
event, but rather a negativity: A symptom is a substitute for something
that did not happen in the form of a failure of practical action. One might
say that such a situation, characterized by its negativity, is conceived by
Freud as the situatedness of the subject within a more or less traumatic
scene, which Freud describes as “an experience which within a short period
of time presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be
dealt with or worked off in the normal way, and this must result in per-
manent disturbances of the manner in which the energy operates.”5 Our
human vulnerability exposes us to that which may overwhelm, traumatize,
and provoke a defense, which takes the form of a symptomatic mark which
thenceforth signifies the primacy of excessive concrete life; the symptom is
an unreasonable, compulsive, yet occasionally effective way of negotiating
unbearable concrete social life. At the same time, the sharing of symptoms
is often the basis for forms of social life.6
The relational approach provides a way to reflect on the suffered soci-
ality of a purportedly intrasubjective process—repression of instincts—
and therefore provides a more coherent account of liberation. If one
accounts for bad conscience merely in terms of repression of innate
instincts, then liberation can only be conceived as the inversion of this
repression. However, if repression, as Nietzsche claims, is a socio-his-
torical process, then a socio-historical account of liberation is needed. A
common view, that liberation is achieved by a “strong individual” who
breaks free of society, presupposes a reified model of the sociality of
subjects, as if they were separate things endowed with traits or capaci-
ties that magically enslave or liberate them. Moreover, this common
view faces the dilemma of explaining how an impulse for independence
emerges from a thoroughly socialized person. If socialization is con-
ceived abstractly as co-opting such individuals into the herd, then some
sort of tenuous conceptualization of an animating source of individual-
ity would need to be posited. The relational approach offers a way to
more coherently explore the socio-historical dimensions of these ques-
tions. As discussed in the Introduction, for Nietzsche, the complex suf-
fered imbrication of sociality and history, on both concrete and symbolic
levels, gives rise to subjectivity; not all socialization is pernicious and all
subjectivity, even that of an emancipated Free Spirit, is conditioned by

social histories. Instinctual, pre-subjective factors do not merely act as
animistic causes, but are imbricated in the subject’s histories; any appeal
to those factors should be thought within the context of our suffered
social histories.
Relationality in the First Essay of on the Genealogy

of Morality
In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche begins to

lay out his genealogical critique of subjectivity. In regard to the history
of the priestly validation of slave morality, he writes: “… with some jus-
tification one could add that man first became an interesting animal on
the foundation of this essentially dangerous form of human existence,
the priest, and that the human soul became deep in the higher sense and
turned evil for the first time … ” (Nietzsche 1997, 16). The target is
the history of the human soul, i.e., human subjectivity, and not merely
a moral theory. On the one hand, it may be said to be at least a partially
discoverable history, separated from us by time and space. On the other
hand, however, Nietzsche is locating an excessive more or less traumatic
element at play in concrete social conditions that gave rise to human sub-
jectivity as a sort of symptom. Nietzsche’s genealogical histories do not
track the constitution of human beings in a deterministic, causal sense;
rather, in the sense that we are suffering, exposed, vulnerable beings
immersed in excess.
In the Preface, Nietzsche remarks that “… we are not ‘knowers’ when
it comes to ourselves … ” (3). Here, he does not mean merely that we
lack knowledge of ourselves and that a proper knowledge of our nature,
or our belonging to nature, would displace our otherworldly fantasies
about ourselves. Rather, he also implies that our relation to ourselves is
not primarily one of knowing; put differently, it is otherwise than know-
ing. One might read this through the subject’s imbrication that was
discussed in the Introduction; in this context, we are imbrications of suf-
fered, social histories, of which our supposed capacities for “free” will
and cognitive access to truth are symptomatic. When it comes to our-
selves, we would be vulnerable negotiators of this imbrication, with abili-
ties to engage and disengage our pros and cons that are conditioned by
the imbrication they negotiate. These abilities take form on a continuum
RELATIONALITY IN THE FIRST ESSAY OF ON THE GENEALOGY … 73
between ressentiment and convalescence, and “knowing” would then be

symptomatic of the vulnerability which conditions our ability to engage
and disengage our values.
On this reading, however, Nietzsche is not positing a separate primary
ontological realm outside of knowing—the body, time, will to power,
etc.—upon which to base his philosophy, which after all is a form of
knowing. As mentioned in the Introduction, in “On Truth and Lie in an
Extra-moral Sense” and elsewhere, he holds out the possibility of a sort
of self-knowledge, if it can be borne, “on the backs of tigers.” Genealogy
is itself a sort of knowing, albeit speculative, grappling, and imperfect.
More importantly, for Nietzsche, genealogy implies a form of suffered,
convalescent reflection, in which subjectivity would encounter and bear
the suffered social histories of which it is a symptom, without a bad con-
science. Genealogical reflection is a reflection that bears its own limit in
that which ruptures and conditions it. To be clear, this is not merely an
affirmation of the metaphysical primacy of difference over identity, but of
the suffered social history of reflection—a history which is ongoing.
Moreover, implied in the claim that we are not primarily “knowers”
is the idea that we are not transparent to ourselves in regard to the con-
fidence we have in our abilities to make value judgments. For example,
consider Nietzsche’s remark: “What if a regressive trait lurked in the
‘good man’, likewise a danger, an enticement, a poison, a narcotic…”
(8). Here, he is not merely criticizing a particular dominant form of the
“good” person—the capitalist, the religious believer, the humble, for
example—that we philosophers can claim superiority over. Rather, he is
pointing to the positing of value at the heart of subjectivity, i.e., to the
taking up of the moral position as such, as harboring regressive impulses.
The very claiming of value, or “goodness,” is itself symptomatic of an
embodied sociality that is more or less pathological.
Criticizing ahistorical accounts of the value of the good in terms of
utility, Nietzsche suggests that the value of “good” is socio-historically
contingent and that it originates within particular social relationships. He
writes:
The pathos of nobility and distance…the continuing and predominant

feeling of complete and fundamental superiority of a higher ruling kind in
relation to a lower kind, to those ‘below’—that is the origin of the antith-
esis ‘good’ and ‘bad’. (The seigneurial privilege of giving names even
allows us to conceive of the origin of language itself as a manifestation of
the power of the rulers: they say ‘this is so and so’, they set their seal on
everything and every occurrence with a sound and thereby take possession
of it, as it were). (12)
One can read this as an extension of the passages discussed earlier related
to the social history of language and consciousness into the themes of
class and morality (“good” vs. “bad”). The positing of existence and
value through naming extends and legitimates the concrete domination
of the ruling class through symbolic possession of things and existence.
Nietzsche implies that it does this primarily in the positing of moral val-
ues in the concepts of “good” and “bad.” In this essay, what is central
is not the positing of “reality,” of a web of simplifications used to refer
to and reflect on reality (albeit a web formed out of concrete socio-his-
torical contexts), but rather the positing of values which represent and
symbolically legitimate and fortify class distinctions in regard to ways of
living. “Good,” which implies a “should,” is an expression of the differ-
ent suffered social histories of the ruling class and fetishizes what they are
simply by virtue of the power to name. Nietzsche claims that there is ety-
mological evidence to support this view: “… the German word ‘schlecht’
(bad) … is identical with ‘schlicht’ (plain, simple)—compare ‘schlechtweg’
(plainly), ‘schlechterdings’ (simply)—and originally referred to the simple,
the common man with no derogatory implication, but simply in contrast
to the nobility” (13). He further links designations for the “good” with
being rich or propertied, with distinctions in skin and hair color, with
making war, and with being godlike (14–15).
Genealogy points out that the socio-historical source of the values—
the suffered, social history of domination—needs to be deciphered in the
form of the signifiers themselves. In subsequent forms of society, signi-
fiers persist in the structure of sociality and reflection in ways that may
immediately appear to be detached from social history—what is partial,
conditioned, and mediated appears to be impartial, unconditioned, and
immediate. It might initially be noted that this is not an illusion or mis-
perception of the “mind,” but rather a function of the distance in chron-
ological time. The symptomatic character of values is partly produced by
the distance from the situation or scene that they express; their fixated-
ness indicates their persistence despite the distance. On the other hand,
this symptomatic character is further complicated by an additional ele-
ment—the priestly spiritualization of values that finds its most enduring
adherents in traumatized slaves.
Nietzsche suggests that these more or less straightforward designa-

tions of social standing were spiritualized and thereby linked with a third
class initially tied to the rulers: the priestly class. In this way, “good” and
“bad” were transformed into distinctions between “pure” and “impure,”
which began as designations for distinct forms of material conditions:
“From the outset the ‘pure man’ was just a man who washed, avoided
foods which cause skin complaints, did not sleep with the filthy women
from the lower orders … ” (15–16). But, subsequently, these designa-
tions were “dangerously internalized and sharpened … and in fact clefts
were finally driven between man and man which even an Achilles of free-
thinking would shudder to cross” (16). In other words, they became
moral values, indicative of elusive spiritual qualities, rather than direct
indices of socio-historical conditions.
A concrete differentiation of power between classes becomes spiritu-
alized, so that externalized contestation is internalized into a spiritual
contest, based on the privileging of masochism through ritual, asceti-
cism, and metaphysics. A rigidification of the division of labor produces
a shift from a guiltless struggle, an innocence in becoming, to a fetishi-
zation of internal actions, self-denial, self-control, and the formation
of human psychology. This is a struggle tailor-made for priests to assert
dominance over warriors who are only able to fight with their hands and
subsequently find themselves to be dependent on priests for value. These
are not merely different conceptual schemes, different value systems, but
rather fundamentally related forms of suffered, social existence, medi-
ated by power. The priest does not merely switch sides (from one sys-
tem to another), but more importantly takes revenge on the noble form
of suffered, social existence that was “… based on a powerful physical-
ity, a blossoming, rich, even effervescent good health that includes the
things needed to maintain it; war, adventure, hunting, dancing, joust-
ing and everything else that contains strong, free, happy action” (17).
Nietzsche suggests that, because of the weakness of the priestly class,
it was easy “for the priestly method of valuation to split off from the
chivalric-aristocratic method and then to develop further into the oppo-
site of the latter … ” (16). The priests—who first represented the sym-
bolization and spiritualization of the material values of the ruling class
upon which they were dependent, to which they were vulnerable—came
unmoored from this grounding, unable to contend with the concrete
and symbolic system imposed by the nobility. In response, the priestly
class detaches, creates, and imposes its own system to spiritualize and
divinize its powerlessness as a mode of revenge—a form of suffered soci-

ality characteristic of slaves, new allies of the priests, who were provided
with concepts and values so that they could take symbolic possession of
things: “‘Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless,
the lowly are good; the suffering, deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the
only pious people, the only ones saved … whereas you rich, the noble
and powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless,
you will also be eternally wretched, cursed and damned!’ … ” (17).
To be clear, although the emphasis is on priestly “values,” those are
not ahistorical, but rather are derived from the social position of the
priests within a system of class domination. Socio-historical conditions
(which include encounters and conflicts between groups) shape forms
of shared suffered existence. These forms of sociality give rise to con-
ceptual and normative schemas: words, concepts, and values as forms
of consciousness, or self-consciousness. In the sections discussed in the
Introduction, there is a general claim about the forgetting of these social
histories of consciousness, which posits itself as its own cause as a cul-
tural form. The “forgetting” is attributed to a need to conform and
thereby avoid consequences, or it is attributed to an inability to bear the
ordeal of knowing. The Genealogy develops this idea insofar as a specula-
tive prehistory is laid out which attributes this “forgetting” to the loss of
nomadic forms of sociality through the suffered imposition of concrete
forms of mass domination. The powerlessness of priests and slaves pro-
duces an uncanny defense mechanism to create fantasies of self-delusion,
to pronounce the utter concrete obliteration of the slave as a victory. It
might be said that genealogy takes the form of a proto-psychoanalytic
account of the pre-subjective, prehistoric conflict which produces neu-
rotic disavowal at the heart of the subject, exposed to excessive social
requirements and demands, deprived of motility in time and place and of
the ability to negotiate and contend with the world as did our nomadic
ancestors. The prime example of this is the assertion of a free will as a
symptomatic fantasy of control, and the assertion of divine judgment for
those without control—a fantasy of justice for those at the violent whims
of others.
The dominant class initially expresses its power by creating concepts,
names, and values, expressing a primitive form of consciousness to ena-
ble conformity and group cohesion in relation to the dominated classes.
This then gives rise to a new class—the priests—who serve the needed
function of mediating these concepts and values for the dominant class.
The priestly class grows and in its suffering at the hands of its rulers finds
a new ally—the mass of slaves.7 This new ally is receptive to a form of
spiritualization provided by the priests, which enables them to see their
own reflection in things, the glory of their own powerlessness, a vehicle
for their own resentment toward the rulers and toward themselves as
embodied, suffering, socio-historical beings.
Notably, he calls this “the slaves’ revolt in morality”—language
which emphasizes the concrete socio-historical conditions of those
whose morality became victorious, which then gave rise to the abstract
designation of “slave morality,” as if it were merely a type, a species
of morality, without a history. Moreover, he suggests that this victory
“needed two millennia to achieve” and therefore is difficult to perceive:
“all long things are difficult to see, to see round” (18). This designa-
tion of slave morality as a type is the expression of a suffered, social his-
tory and not simply expressive of the body, forces, difference, nihilism,
instincts, or some other abstraction. The revolt of slaves in the realm
of morality is a long, excessive history that is not primarily known, but
is rather the long, suffered, complexly social condition of possibility of
knowing. The symptomatic character of values is attributed to the tem-
poral and spatial distance between that abject history and contempo-
rary society, but also to the unbearable nature of that history. The long,
suffered, social, embodied history that constituted the slaves’ revolt in
morality is conceptualized by Nietzsche as the process by which res-
sentiment “turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of
those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate
for it only with imaginary revenge” (20). Ressentiment is not a simple
concept, mood, disposition, or emotion, but rather a signifier for the
most prominent psycho-social symptom of this excessive history. To say
that “it” creates values is to imply the excess of this history, not to posit
a cause in a type of physiology, personality type, or preponderance of
reactive forces, but rather to point toward the situated social position
of our enslaved ancestors, who were “denied the proper response of
action.”
In the diagnosis of what conditions the direction taken between
the slave’s positing of “Evil” and “Good,” and the noble’s positing of
“good” and “bad,” there is a conspicuous imbrication of physiology,
sociality, history, and suffering. Again, this distinction has both a con-
crete social history and a contemporary existence as a suffered struggle
between “types.” Nietzsche writes:
Whereas all noble morality grows out of triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself,
slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’,
‘non-self’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed…in order to come about, slave
morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologi-
cally speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all…The opposite is the
case with the noble method of valuation: this acts and grows spontane-
ously, seeking out its opposite only so that it can say ‘yes’ to itself even
more thankfully and exultantly… (20).
The figure of the slave implies a history of exposure to the other and
outside which was more or less traumatic—victimized by others,
deprived of motility and peaceful exploration. Such a history produces
symptomatic defenses against the outside and the other, which were pri-
marily experienced as sources of suffering. Slave morality is thereby based
on a socially shared dissociation from the other and the shared assertion
of a magical form of subjectivity.
On the one hand, slave morality emerges from a form of social life in
which slaves are dominated by another class which denies their action.
The slave is denied motility and therefore loses possibilities of explor-
ing, loving, resisting, hating, and negotiating objects (including oth-
ers). In some measure, one might say that for the slave, action is more
or less traumatic, entailing an exposure and vulnerability that circum-
scribes agency or inverts it into a magical form—magic as a symptom of
the internalization, incorporation of the concrete thwarting of the slave
class’s abilities to work-through the world of objects, to mediate their
needs. The material, social conditions give rise to a fixated psychological
form, which then seeks its oppressor, its barrier, and invents it, if it does
not exist. It becomes a floating narrative form founded on irresolvable,
fixated victimhood, reactivity, and vulnerability, but which nonetheless
facilitates the growth of mass societies. In contrast, the noble is mobile,
concretely free to explore and engage with others without trauma. The
noble seeks the other or the unknown to then find her or himself again,
anew. To be clear, this distinction is not unambiguous since Nietzsche
grants that this prehistoric noble was also ruthless and violent and that
the victory of slave morality created the necessary conditions for some-
thing like self-consciousness to emerge.8
Nietzsche writes: “The history of mankind would be far too stupid
a thing if it had not had the intellect [Geist] of the powerless injected
into it … ” (17). It is through the victory of slaves’ values that human
subjectivity was possible, which implies that historically one cannot

return to prehistoric nobility. Nonetheless the noble’s psychosocial type
carries with it a potentiality, occasionally visible and active, despite the
victory of the slave’s psychosocial type. In some sense, Nietzsche sees
contemporary culture as expressing the battle between the two types of
“good” implicit in noble and slave morality, respectively; he writes: “…
there is, today, perhaps no more distinguishing feature of the ‘higher
nature’, the intellectual nature, than to be divided in this sense and really
and truly a battle ground for these opposites” (32). References later in
the essay to the “man of ressentiment” and the “noble man” are a bit
ambiguous in regard to whether they refer to our ancestors or to con-
temporaries, and as symptomatic types, they are not neatly separate. For
example, the noble type experiences ressentiment, but as a moment that
passes, i.e., not as the fixated basis upon which personality is structured.9
The creation of the concept of “free will” is the culmination of this
spiritualization of values, as a symptom of powerlessness. It enables the
assigning of “responsibility” and thereby rank and, at least symbolically,
enables one to control oneself and others. In this sense, it is the fanta-
sized need of one who is concretely obliterated (one might say “trauma-
tized”) and denied freedom, an exaggeration of those who cannot bear
the excessive, exposed character of socio-historical existence—the debts
and credits incurred, the loss, the transience, the effort, the ordeal, the
pain, the frustration, the imperfection, the unknown, the chance, the
messy entanglement of freedom with un-freedom. He writes:
…popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as

though there were an indifferent substratum behind the strong person which
had the freedom to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum;
there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the
doer’ is invented as an afterthought,–the doing is everything…the entrenched,
secretly smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred put this belief to their
own use and, in fact, do not defend any belief more passionately than that the
strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs:–in this
way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of
prey…‘We weak people are just weak; it is good to do nothing for which we
are not strong enough’…The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially
say, the soul) has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because
it facilitated that sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the
weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as free-
dom, and their particular mode of existence as an accomplishment. (26)
The assertion of free will helps to protect the narcissism of those who
cannot bear the other, cannot bear motile negotiation and contending
with objectivity. It acts as a node of power, which turns the tables on the
strong, who are then condemned for lacking the “moral strength” to be
like the herd, the group. It is imagined as a retroactive fantasy, an after-
thought, i.e., as a response, a defense mechanism to cope with power-
lessness, to delude themselves about their own unbearable entanglement
in the intolerable. Americans project fantasies of “the other,” for exam-
ple, to provide cover for an unspeakable history for which they and their
ancestors are partly responsible. If they did not believe in the prevalence
of evil people in Iraq, for example, they would have to face their com-
plicity in the unspeakable deaths, maiming, and displacement of count-
less Iraqis.
The inability to contend with objects, to bear the strangeness and
precarious suffering they bring, gives rise to the magical wish of their
overcoming. As a form of disguise of this wish, which is actually an
expression of futility, it is located in a non-location, outside of space and
time, in a “mind.” This is then made sacred: the foundation of dominant
forms of religion, capitalism, the philosophical subject, and the struc-
tures of morality that govern social relations (including the most con-
servative and the most liberal political positions). The structure of “free
will” is then co-implicit in a bipolar value system which posits Good vs.
Evil. The bipolarity expresses a partial, split sense of objectivity, which
infuses ourselves and the other. We end up on the “good” side, out of a
primitive need to maintain stability, both psychically and in terms of the
environment constituted by others—it provides consistent social bonds
and thereby an environment which protects me from regression to chaos.
The affiliation of ourselves with the slave’s “Good” is an expression of
narcissism, preserved socially both concretely and symbolically, which
protects us from disruption. The concept of free will is a symptom of this
narcissism, a crude remainder of an aborted attempt at object relations,
i.e., of negotiating suffered, social histories.
The concept of free will also implies the possibility of caricaturing the
other which preserves the herd, enabling the social preservation of narcis-
sism. To transcend the respective caricatures of the self or the other would
mean to suffer the loss of the protective herd which is built on this carica-
ture. Nietzsche’s analysis of “free-will” allows us to understand the blam-
ing of social chaos on other groups—Communists, terrorists, etc.—because
that blaming preserves the stability at the basis of slave morality and prevents
RELATIONALITY IN THE SECOND ESSAY … 81
what slaves find unbearable: negotiating real objects in suffered, dialectical

movement which transcends the partial perspective fetishized by the herd,
including themselves. As we have seen, on Nietzsche’s account, this suffered,
embodied, social embeddedness is the basis of “epistemology.” Being able to
bear this movement, i.e., being able to convalesce, is a condition of possibility
for the transformation of social conditions, a possibility that is unthinkable for
the slave, who can only conceive of emancipation as a magical fantasy.
Relationality in the Second Essay of on the Genealogy

of Morality
Three dimensions of the second essay that are relevant to the theme of
relationality, are the ambiguous distinction between conscience and bad
conscience, Nietzsche’s linking of love with bad conscience, and the
ambiguous Sect. 7 of the essay. The latter includes a seemingly glaring
ambiguity that arises from the characterization of a claimed contempo-
rary inability to bear suffering in the midst of an argument which accounts
for the origins of modern subjectivity in self-torture. How is it that essen-
tially self-torturing creatures are said to be unable to experience pain? This
ambiguity is clarified if one sees conscience relationally, as a traumatic
symptom, rather than merely as the expression of a natural instinct to
inflict pain. Reading this with Sect. 338 of Gay Science supports the inter-
pretation that the symptom of conscience is socially and materially repro-
duced. Simultaneously, it suggests that the subject’s liberation from bad
conscience can be conceived as a social process of convalescence—bearing
our suffered singularity amidst the social pressure to obliterate it and creat-
ing new social conditions that would facilitate convalescence.
The essay begins with the question: “To breed an animal with the
prerogative to promise—is that not precisely the paradoxical task which
nature has set herself with regard to humankind?” (35) With this ques-
tion, Nietzsche begins his inquiry into the genealogy of conscience, which
is both the locus of promising and that which distinguishes the human
animal from other animals. In the first part of the essay, conscience is
more broadly characterized as constitutive of the human being as such;
however horrible its natural history, it is also what makes us what we are.
Nietzsche suggests that our ancestors were taught to promise within
sadomasochistic social economies, constituted by socially regulated tor-
ture and pain.10 He writes:
‘How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you impress
something upon this partly dull, partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this per-
sonification of forgetfulness, so that it will stick?’…This age-old question
was not resolved with gentle solutions and methods, as can be imagined;
perhaps there is nothing more terrible and strange in man’s prehistory
than his technique of mnemonics. ‘A thing much be burnt in so that it stays
in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the mem-
ory’… (38)
Nietzsche emphasizes that this sadomasochistic element is shaped by the

creditor–debtor relationship. Nietzsche writes:
The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, to pursue our train of inquiry

again, originated…in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship
there is, in the relationship of buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: here
person met person for the first time, and measured himself person against
person. No form of civilization has been discovered which is so low that
it did not display something of this relationship. Fixing prices, setting val-
ues, working out equivalents, exchanging—this preoccupied man’s first
thoughts to such a degree that in a certain sense it constitutes thought…
Buying and selling, with their psychological trappings, are older than the
beginnings of any social form of organization; it is much more the case
that the germinating sensation of barter, contract, debt, right, duty, com-
pensation was simply transferred from the most rudimentary form of the
legal rights of persons to the most crude and elementary social units…man
soon arrived at the great generalization: ‘Everything has its price: every-
thing can be compensated for’—the oldest, most naïve canon of morals
relating to justice… (45–46)
There are at least two important aspects of this passage. First, essential to
living a social, human life is the fact that we owe others and others owe
us; because of our vulnerability and finitude, we always already find our-
selves in the position of both debtor and creditor. At the same time, this
indebtedness is suffered in complex ways as blame, as guilt, as desire for
revenge, as stimulus to overcome oneself and transform society—in other
words, as ressentiment. Human conscience is claimed to be a descendant
of our suffered indebtedness, which created a lasting memory in the con-
text of an all-pervasive prehistoric forgetfulness. By reminding ourselves
of our indebtedness and of the debts owed to us, the possibility of nor-
mative action emerges.
Second, the claim that the idea that “everything has a price and can
be paid for” is the “most naïve” canon of morality is an insistence on the
negative moment of this social dialectic. There is something about our
suffered sociality that is excessive, that cannot be appropriated by com-
pensatory values, i.e., that defies meaning. This amounts to a critique of
a variety of religiously informed conceptions of history, including posi-
tive versions of Hegelian dialectics in which the cunning of world spirit
would ultimately redeem the abominable violence of human history by
bringing about a future of justice. For Nietzsche, relationality is consti-
tuted by moments of meaningless, irredeemable suffering, which rupture
our ideas. This positing of equivalencies implies a responsible, free-will-
ing subject—dissociated from its relational histories—discussed in the
first essay of the Genealogy. As discussed earlier, this is not merely the
result of a metaphysical belief, but rather is the symptom of suffered soci-
ality. The lambs invent the idea of free will to defend themselves against
the unbearable negativity of experience.
One of the main debates on the second essay of the Genealogy has to
do with the meaning of the difference between conscience and bad con-
science.11 If conscience as such is produced by the monstrous history of
the often violent imposition of the “social straightjacket” upon human
beings, then how are we to understand the socio-historical production
of bad conscience? On our reading, for Nietzsche, bad conscience oper-
ates like a symptom of trauma. In contrast, mere conscience—the ability
to promise—can to some extent be understood as a pragmatic adapta-
tion to naturalistically conceived events. Overall, this history might be
called “more or less traumatic.” Our suffered histories may not give rise
to bad conscience and do so when culture reproduces traumatic oblit-
eration of pragmatic subjectivity. For Freud, trauma designates the
rupture of experience that overwhelms us, exceeding our abilities to
practically respond; it is the constitutive excess of being outside of our-
selves, immersed in externality, and one of the vicissitudes of an external-
ity which is inevitably internalized.12 From this perspective, the human
being guided by a bad conscience could be seen as symptomatic, such
that his or her genealogy would, at a minimum, need to reflectively
uncover a history traumatic enough to produce such an absurd symp-
tom. However, to be clear, this traumatic element is of a different order
than reflection; it exceeds reflection and thereby needs to be negoti-
ated—only within such a negotiation can reflection do its work.
In the context of this broad sadomasochistic social history, Nietzsche

then defines bad conscience as the inability to contend with and nego-
tiate the unpredictability and suffering of our relationality. Despite the
fact that Nietzsche appeals to instincts, cruelty, and other quasi-meta-
physical concepts to account for the origin of bad conscience, his link-
ing of bad conscience to a particular vicissitude of the creditor–debtor
relationship might be read as an assertion of its fundamental relationality.
According to Nietzsche, bad conscience is
a serious illness to which man was forced to succumb by the pressure of

the most fundamental of all changes which he experienced, –that change
whereby he finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of soci-
ety and peace. It must have been no different for these semi-animals, hap-
pily adapted to the wilderness, war, the wandering life and adventure than
it was for the sea animals when they were forced to either become land
animals or perish—at one go, all instincts were devalued and ‘suspended’.
Now they had to walk on their feet and ‘carry themselves’, whereas they
had been carried by the water up till then; a terrible heaviness bore down
on them…they did not have their familiar guide any more for this new,
unknown world, those regulating impulses that unconsciously led them
to safety—the poor things were reduced to relying on thinking, inference,
calculation…on their ‘consciousness,’ that most impoverished and error-
prone organ! I do not think there has ever been such a feeling of misery
on earth, such a leaden discomfort, and meanwhile, the old instincts had
not suddenly ceased to make their demands…they mainly had to seek new
and as it were underground gratifications. All instincts which are not dis-
charged outwardly turn inwards…Animosity, cruelty, the pleasure of pur-
suing, raiding, changing and destroying—all this was pitted against the
person who had such instincts: that is the origin of ‘bad conscience’. (57)
In interpreting this passage, and others, commentators often simply

repeat Nietzsche’s own terminology and underplay the rather conspicu-
ous element of loss—which is the socio-historical context for the inter-
nalization of the instincts. The trauma of the loss of our prior ways of
being-in-the-world produced by socialization is what brings about this
so-called internalization of instinct. Faced with the obliteration of our
systems of meaning, immersed in traumatic excess, one’s being is dis-
placed, dispersed, and fixated in absurd ways, yielding the perverse
varieties of fixation outside of time that Nietzsche identifies as bad con-
science, eternity, God, metaphysics, philosophical idealism, and gram-
mar which may be seen as Nietzschean symptoms. A “serious illness”
produced by the “pressure” of the “feeling of misery” and “leaden dis-

comfort” arose in the wake of this loss; it is the pressure and the intensity
of the loss that is the condition of possibility of the internalization. With
bad conscience, “the worst and most insidious illness was introduced…
man’s sickness of man, of himself: as the result of a forcible breach with
his animal past, a simultaneous leap and fall into new situations and con-
ditions of existence, a declaration of war against all the old instincts on
which, up till then, his strength, pleasure and formidableness had been
based” (Nietzsche 1997, 57). Humans thus declared war on their own
instinctual pasts; bad conscience is the rage against this past. We cannot
bear ourselves because acting in accord with our old instincts would reac-
tivate the trauma by putting us into conflict with the dominant social
norms.
The loss of nomadic life is undergone socially—the loss of one form of
sociality and the emergence of new mass forms of sociality. One imagines
humans living in smaller groups, more isolated from one another, with
more motility and space to roam. On Nietzsche’s account, such exist-
ence would require less repression to maintain social bonds. The loss
was probably a bit more gradual than Nietzsche’s depiction of its sud-
denness allows—although this purported suddenness gestures toward
its traumatic character. It implies the need to become hypersocial—the
demands and expectations placed on a singular subject’s existence by
other subjects are excessive, where no action can be carried out with-
out being exposed to an almost infinite contestation by others living in
close proximity. Conscience is the symptom of this contestation, i.e., the
vulnerability of the subject to other subjects. I promise, vouch for my
future, as a response to the complexity of social demands with which I
am faced. As discussed, this promise can take on a more or less sympto-
matic form—on the one hand, conscience is an internalized response to
pragmatic needs; on the other hand, bad conscience is symptomatic of
the traumatic character of this loss. To account for this difference merely
as the result of an instinct for cruelty directed inward would occlude the
loss that constitutes our suffered social histories.
One might argue, following Hans Loewald’s psychoanalytic account
of instincts, that for Nietzsche, instincts are ingrained adaptations to
particular material environments.13 For Loewald, “instinctual drives
organize environment and are organized by it … It is the mutuality of
organization, in the sense of organizing each other, which constitutes the
inextricable interrelatedness of ‘inner and outer world’.”14 These adap-
tations cannot simply disappear when the material conditions change,
they linger and continue to impose themselves—leaving us as partial

aliens, built for a world which no longer exists. Furthermore, this sug-
gests a way to understand the “instinct for cruelty,” insofar as what we
consider “cruelty” was necessary to carry out the struggle for existence
for our prehistoric ancestors. In other words, there is no reason to take
Nietzsche as articulating a full-blown theory of innate instincts, which
are conceived in abstraction from natural history. Rather, he is talking
about the suffered ordeal of our ancestors—who were “adapted to” wil-
derness and adventure—in the midst of monumental socio-historical
loss. As will be discussed in Chap. 5, Winnicott’s analysis of aggression
stresses its origins in motile interaction with and through the objective
environment, such that dissociation from that environment may lead to
pathologies of aggression.
According to one interpretation of this passage, you only get “bad
conscience” when the “tortured, miserable creature” follows the advice
of the ascetic priest and sees himself as the cause of his own suffer-
ing, i.e., one does not get a bad conscience until one interprets oneself
a certain way, in accord with the advice another.15 Such a reading cap-
tures part of the essential ideological dimension of the reproduction of
bad conscience—suffering is interpreted within dominant structures of
meaning—yet, it begs the question of the susceptibility to the priestly
narrative, since the origin of the ascetic priest’s bad conscience and the
proclivity to heed this advice needs to be accounted for. On our inter-
pretation, traumatic dissociation prepares the ground for the reproduc-
tion of the figure of the priest, his or her interpretations, and the ability
to be seduced by them. Alternatively, one might say that genealogy—as
the working-through of this more or less traumatic past—might be seen
as the condition of possibility for overcoming bad conscience. Another
commentator suggests the origin of genuinely bad conscience, i.e., res-
sentiment, lies in the quantity of repression experienced by the slave.16
The nobles experience ressentiment but are “not nearly as repressed
as those at the bottom of the pile,” because they can express their
instincts.17 But, again, how can this repression be ameliorated socio-his-
torically? Clarifying the socio-historical context of this “excessive repres-
sion” provides a more coherent account.
On our reading, conscience—as opposed to bad conscience—could
be read as a moment. Thinking with a bad conscience is non-dialectical
thinking in the sense that it cannot see itself as a moment that is condi-
tioned and ruptured by suffering. One might say that conscience is the
NATURALISM AND ANIMISTIC SUBJECTIVITY: … 87
affective experience of a norm. Conscience, then, is not something that a

human can simply do without. It is integral to the work of freeing itself
from slave morality, insofar as this work also entails moments of the over-
coming of conscience in which there is an integration of the norm within
suffered social life. Within such a process, one’s values would not simply
be the expression of socially conditioned desire, but of complexly imbri-
cated, suffered social existence—symbolized by the overcoming of Good
and Evil, or the embracing of eternal recurrence. On this reading, guilt
is not a faculty, experience, or human trait, but can only be understood
in the context of the encounter with more or less traumatic suffered
social history. Facing the overwhelming, guilt (and the “Thou shalt”)
will come as an expression of the longing for otherwise and elsewhere
implicit in the ascetic ideal. Maybe the overcoming of guilt requires a
history of self-correction, self-splitting—not as the ideal part of the self
dragging the other part along with it, training it, but rather as the work
of the convalescent whose ideals are ruptured and conditioned by nega-
tivity. In Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt, the latter is traced as a symptom
of suffered social histories, whereby the contingency of the social con-
tent is displaced by a negotiation with the need for sociality which led to
the internalization of that content. When norms and guilt are worked-
through, the social content is loosened, but normativity remains as a
moment of self-legislation. Self-legislation overcomes itself in moments
of performative negotiation of the suffered social history of which it is
symptomatic.
Naturalism and Animistic Subjectivity: Common

Approaches
One of the most common accounts of Nietzsche’s genealogical philoso-
phy is that it serves to subvert dominant moral interpretations of phe-
nomena by providing naturalistic explanations of the same phenomena.
This subversion is said to be furthered by the fact that the naturalistic
elements revealed in the genealogy turn out to be rather “immoral,”
such that “good,” “guilt,” “God,” and the entire moral vocabulary lose
their absolute foundation and are shown to be complicit with their con-
ceptual opposites.18 Such accounts of genealogy are often consistent with
Nietzsche’s arguments in important ways. That said, they can only be
coherent if they can account for the more or less traumatic character of
our social histories and, consequently, for the symptomatic character of

the subjectivity that would carry out the genealogy.
Naturalistic accounts also often have the potential danger of endow-
ing Nietzsche’s admittedly naturalistic concepts with ontological mean-
ing. For example, another commentator traces the conscience back to
a fundamental instinct of human cruelty which is forced to turn inward
by social barriers which prevent the outward expression of the instinct:
“… having a bad conscience or feeling guilty is a way in which we sat-
isfy a fundamental need to inflict cruelty. This is achieved by turning
the exercise of cruelty inwards, upon the self rather than others …”.19
To be clear, such a reading in some sense closely follows the letter of
Nietzsche’s text; Nietzsche often uses quasi-metaphysical language to
express his views. That said, here and in his other works, Nietzsche never
develops a systematic account of personhood based on this supposed
“fundamental need to inflict cruelty.” What one does find are attempts
to clarify the suffered social dimensions of ressentiment, which conditions
reflection. In short, to be clear, there is a tendency in some contempo-
rary accounts of genealogy to present nature as merely being the object
of genealogical reflection, whereas Nietzsche also presents nature and its
constitutive negativity as that which conditions reflection. The psycho-
analytic concept of the trauma helps us to conceive of the power nature
has over reflection, such that the valorized genealogical reflection would
have suffered conditions of possibility.
David Owen, for example, suggests that “the task that genealogy
confronts is (i) freeing its audience from the grip of the perspective in
terms of which they currently understand their ethical agency, (ii) pro-
viding internal reasons for this audience to re-evaluate their values …
it conducts this enquiry through a historical account of how we have
become what we are that has recourse to the methodological stance of a
non-reductive naturalism.”20 He suggests that the reason for the failure
of engagement of Anglo-American moral philosophy with Nietzsche’s
genealogy “is the commitment to an ahistorical conception of their phil-
osophical activity in which morality is taken as a given.”21
The problem is that this account of genealogical critique abstracts
the subject from its suffered social context, endowing it with a magi-
cal power to free us from our perspectival situatedness, thereby provid-
ing us with sufficient reasons for reevaluating our values. This approach
describes the barrier to this sort of subjective shift simply in terms of
having a “commitment” to ahistorical conceptions. In so doing, it is
NATURALISM AND ANIMISTIC SUBJECTIVITY: … 89
oblivious to the fact that Nietzsche’s genealogy is an account of the suf-

fered socially reproduced inability to bear history, that its fundamental
task is to bring the thinker to a negotiation with the abject origins of
subjectivity and to show that reflection is symptomatic of that abjection,
and that coherent reflection would acknowledge that it is conditioned or
ruptured by that abjection. A subjectivity which cannot bear history will
not be able to overcome itself merely as an effect of being provided with
good reasons to do so. To put it another way, such accounts presuppose
a version of the subjectivity that Nietzsche is diagnosing as symptomatic.
If Nietzsche’s philosophy is naturalistic, this is only so because of a
transfigured conception of “nature” as being infused with the negative.
It is not a matter of a naturalistic account of morality somehow caus-
ing a new understanding of motivation. Owen et al. presuppose a sort
of epistemological distance between nature and ourselves and reduce
Nietzsche’s thought to operating within that gap to show how we are
a part of that nature. Despite the value of such a reading, it is oblivious
to the primacy of suffered social histories within reflection itself, which
is symptomatic of that nature. We are not just a part of nature, but also
symptomatic of that more or less traumatic, more or less overwhelming
nature, which exceeds, undergirds, and ruptures subjectivity. Suffered
social histories condition the subjectivity that would reflect on these his-
tories, and to insist on the primacy of the understanding as some sort of
spontaneous or animistic cause may be an example of the fundamental
error in regard to causation discussed in Twilight of the Idols.22
Surprisingly, Foucault’s account of genealogy valorizes a similarly ani-
mistic subject. For Foucault—emphases added—“the genealogist refuses
to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there
is ‘something altogether different’ behind things: not a timeless and essen-
tial secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence
… not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other
things. It is disparity.”23 Genealogy teaches us to laugh at claims of “the
solemnities of the origin (Ursprung)”; it “requires patience and a knowl-
edge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material
… relentless erudition…”.24 The genealogist “must be able to recognize the
events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalat-
able defeats … he must be able to diagnose the illnesses of the body, its con-
ditions of weakness and strength, its breakdowns and resistances, to be
in a position to judge philosophical discourse.”25 For Foucault, “… the
historical sense canevade metaphysics and become a privileged instrument
of genealogy if it refuses the certainty of absolutes … it corresponds to the

acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates, and disperses … the kind of
dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself … of shattering the
unity of man’s being through which it was thought that he could extend his
sovereignty to the events of his past.”26
Genealogy is portrayed here as the subjective activity of a thinker with
certain traits—virtue, knowledge, erudition, or acuity that can evade
metaphysics. In other words, the genealogist is endowed with subjec-
tive traits and actions that contrast with the subjective traits and actions
of the metaphysician who seeks and has faith in the origin. At the same
time, for Foucault, “history” and “the body” have the form of a kind of
truth, as things to be known (albeit as difference or intensities). There is a
conspicuous lack of an avowal of the imbrication of the valorized genea-
logical subjectivity and the object which it supposedly uncovers; gene-
alogy is said to direct its gaze to “the body, the nervous system … ,”
but without an account of how “the body” and “the nervous system”
condition and make possible such a gaze. “The body” is treated like an
object of reflection, when for Nietzsche, embodied, suffered social histories
condition reflection, whether in its metaphysical or genealogical form. In
other words, in some ways, Foucault’s approach seems to reinscribe the
distance between reflection and its objects, albeit for a supposedly non-
metaphysical outcome which sacrifices the subject of knowledge.27
Love and the Sociality of Unpayable Debt

According to Nietzsche, just as people inherit notions of “good” and
“bad,” they also inherit debts and the longing to pay off those debts.
The creditor–debtor relationship—as we have seen, implicit within basic
forms of human relating—extends to ancestors; fear of ancestors’ seeking
of repayment for our debts to them is, Nietzsche suggests, the origin of
gods. Nietzsche says that in the person with bad conscience, the morali-
zation of this inheritance takes on monstrous form—the paying off of the
inherited debt is taken to be impossible. This is then a pernicious reifica-
tion of the merely naïve position mentioned above that everything can
be paid off. Nietzsche says that the
concepts of ‘debt’ and ‘duty’ are to be reversed…firstly against the ‘debtor’,

in whom bad conscience now so firmly establishes itself…the idea that it
cannot be paid off (‘eternal punishment’)…ultimately, however, against
LOVE AND THE SOCIALITY OF UNPAYABLE DEBT 91
the ‘creditor’…the beginning of the human race, of his ancestor who is

now burdened with a curse…or of nature, from whom man originated and
to whom the principle of evil is imputed…or of existence in general, which
is left standing as inherently worthless… (Nietzsche 1997, 63)
In the person of bad conscience, this cycle of indebtedness and cred-

iting (including the extension of this to gods to whom we owe every-
thing) takes on a perverse symptomatic form. The trauma obliterates the
subject’s ability to negotiate this economy, and that obliterated form of
being-in-the-world then legitimates its own obliteration by divinizing it.
Humiliation becomes divine and consequently a form of fetishized rela-
tionality.
One should note here that the theme of loss is once again implicit
in Nietzsche’s analysis. In the context of the loss of prehistoric ways of
being-in-the-world, our ancestors also suffered the loss of others—in
this context, primarily parental figures and leaders—to whom they were
attached. This loss, then, can be read as being more or less traumatic,
with the potential of provoking seemingly absurd defense mechanisms,
such as the fixation of the active economic relationships into a neurotic
eternity of indebtedness. In the context of their precarious finite attach-
ments to others, our ancestors faced the loss of those others, leaving
them exposed, forced to adapt and build new attachments. This ordeal
may be dealt with by some who are able to work-through the loss and
find a way to create new forms of sociality. For others, this loss may be
traumatic, giving rise to symptoms that nonetheless may serve to pre-
serve a type of lost order—in the divinization of the power of the lost
other and the externalization of one’s debt to the power of that other.
Nietzsche writes:
We have here a sort of madness of the will showing itself in mental cruelty
which is absolutely unparalleled: man’s will to find himself guilty and con-
demned without hope of reprieve…his will to infect and poison the fun-
damentals of things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order
to cut himself off, once and for all, from the way out of this labyrinth of
‘fixed ideas’…What ideas he has, what perversity, what hysterical nonsense,
what bestiality of thought immediately erupts, the moment he is prevented,
if only gently, from being a beast in deed!…Here is sickness, without a
doubt, the most terrible sickness ever to rage in man:–and whoever is still
able to hear (but people have no ear for it nowadays!–) how the shout of
love has rung out during the night of torture and absurdity, the shout of
the most yearning rapture, of salvation through love, turns away, gripped
by an unconquerable horror…There is so much in man that is horrify-
ing!…The world has been a madhouse for too long!… (64)
For psychoanalysis, love is the irrational, largely unconscious, basis of

sociality. The coupling of the bad conscience with love is the making
social of the bad conscience—the sanctification of bad conscience with
the implicit proclamation that to be social means to share in social res-
sentiment, which Freud links with the cultural superego. Thus, love—the
most fundamental social bond—is infused with the fetishization of res-
sentiment. Nietzsche uses proto-psychoanalytic language, characterizing
the problem of bad conscience as a problem of being fixated, of being
cut off, “once and for all, from the way out.” Within this fixated culture,
when we love our family, friends, partners, communities, ideals, symbols,
or selves, we must do so in a way that arises from and perpetuates ressen-
timent, because only this is recognized as love within the cultural sym-
bolic.
The crucifixion, the symbol of ultimate humiliation and rupture of
our sociality, becomes the basis for all social life within which the trauma-
tized are barred from all reparation, since that would entail exposure to
the more or less traumatic negativity of history. Humiliation is the basis
of the reification of exchange in the idea of an unpayable debt; such a
fixated experience which bars exchange can be seen as a defense against
relationality as an exchange. The bad conscience is the fixated vigilant
defense against contending with socio-historical suffering. Unable to
bear the temporal, suffered struggle for existence, the defense mecha-
nism takes on the ultimate social sanctification by equating itself with
love. Alternative forms of love are to be repressed, or obliterated at
all costs. All of this comes to a culmination in Christianity’s “stroke of
genius: none other than God sacrificing himself for man’s debt … God
paying himself back … as the only one able to redeem man from what …
has become irredeemable … out of love for his debtor! … ” (63). God’s
love thus divinizes subjects who are unable to bear the suffered strug-
gle of life—a struggle which requires us to owe others and to be owed
by others, to suffer and inflict suffering on others, in ways that cannot
always be paid off or redeemed.28
The image of a god who is brutally, monstrously destroyed for me to
be released from the weight of infinite debt represents the divinized reifi-
cation of indebtedness—God gets obliterated in order to forgive eternal,
unpayable debts; a magical, fantasied escape from the inescapable. This

is not escaping into a new world, but an expression of the persistence of
the status quo. Love is constituted as an eternalization of ressentiment,
in the form of a consolation for irreparable loss. One might say that this
religious artifact has taken on the form of a floating signifier which facili-
tates mass neurosis; the fetishized commodity is the contemporary form
of Christian love in which exchange value takes on mystical social value,
serving as a defense against abilities to bear the negativity of socio-histor-
ical existence.29
One might say that conscience, which is neither good nor bad in
itself, represents a moment in the dialectic of personhood. Bad con-
science is the fixation of the dialectic on this one moment, the death of
the dialectic and foreclosure on desire and externality, on internal and
external nature—which can only be experienced as traumatic by the per-
son of bad conscience. It thus marks the socially reproduced defense
against the social give and take of crediting and indebtedness and as such
marks the locus of domination. Unable to bear the ordeal that would be
needed to challenge the internalized power of the social “should,” the
dialectic of credit and debt is reified into an eternal indebtedness that
can only be redeemed theologically, through a revelatory event of for-
giveness, maniacal release from eternal guilt. The symbolic oblivion of
crediting and debt—for Nietzsche—is the attempt to separate from the
suffered, social intercourse which is inseparable. Bad conscience takes
the form of a shared, enculturated, defensive obedience, where each is
turned into “any nobody”.
These passages on credit and debit offer a critique of the idea that
sociality can be regulated by equivalencies. Similar critiques will be dis-
cussed in Chaps. 4 and 5 in the context of Adorno’s critique of identity
and Klein’s concept of reparation. For Nietzsche, social history is infused
with a negativity that not only disrupts identities, but also produces suf-
fering and loss that have no equivalencies and can never be redeemed.
There is no equivalent repayment for the complexity of debts owed to a
parent, or owed by that parent to a child, both of whom are descendants
of a suffered, social history, of which they are symptomatic. To fix an
equivalency of a proper form of repayment in terms of the performance
of a proper ritual, an inflicting of a proper amount of suffering on others,
or the inflicting of suffering on oneself, is to reify that excessive social
history. For Nietzsche, the apex of this reification is the conception of
the magical absolution of all of these debts and credits by a god endowed
with the power to redeem from an intolerable social life. Guided by the
logic of equivalencies imposed by the “social straightjacket,” unsatisfied
with the available cultural rituals and the history of failure of human civi-
lization for resolving these debts, only the intervention of a magical god
could provide justice. The dialectic of credit and debt is reified into an
eternal indebtedness that can only be redeemed theologically, through a
revelatory event of forgiveness, a maniacal release from eternal guilt.
On the one hand, there are cultural rituals that establish codes of repay-
ment. On the other hand, there are cultural rituals that posit the constitu-
tive inability to repay the pain inflicted and suffered and hence the need
for a god to guarantee the logic of equivalence and redemption. Although
Nietzsche recognizes the latter as being the most pernicious cultural form,
there is no mere turning back to a pre-Judeo-Christian world without it.
Rather, the suggested salutary direction lies in a new, convalescent form of
exchange and culture governed by the non-equivalent, the non-identical.
One might also think of Nietzsche’s comments on the ability to “digest”
experiences, as expressions of this convalescence within which one comes
to have a good conscience about the excessive, suffered nature of suffered
life and is more able to work-through suffering inflicted by and on others.
In such a culture, suffering would not merely be an occasion for blame
and shame, but rather for the shared work of preempting the traumatic
and the facilitation of singular convalescences.
Nietzsche’s convalescent overcoming of this pathology would involve
breaking from these fixated sorts of attachments that obligate me to others
and others to me. This would mean neither a total break from all debts,
nor an unpayable infinite debt, but rather an ability to engage (to give and
get from others) and disengage (an ability to break, to transgress the limit
of that form of giving and getting), so that one might engage again in new
ways, with new forms of giving and new needs and desires. Such engaging
and disengaging need not take the form of a rejection of particular loved
ones, cultures, institutions (and a glorification of solitude or some sort of
idealized future), but rather the transformation of those relationships, cul-
tures, and institutions.
As an example of the humiliation at the heart of the imbrication
between the positing of responsible free-willing subject and this system of
equivalencies, one might consider Nietzsche’s remark in The Gay Science,
commenting on the dying Socrates. Nietzsche writes:
Whether it was death or the poison or piety or malice—something loos-

ened his tongue and he said: ‘O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster.’ This
ridiculous and terrible ‘last word’ means for those who have ears: ‘o Crito,
life is a disease.’ Is it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully
and like a soldier in plain view of everyone, was a pessimist? He had merely
kept a cheerful demeanour while all his life hiding his ultimate judge-
ment…Socrates suffered from life!30
At the moment prior to his death, Socrates shows a masochist allegiance

to the ascetic ideal, here taking the form of a system of equivalencies
governing debts and credits. In the moment of encounter with a nega-
tivity which is completely obliterating his subjectivity, he valorizes slave
morality—the obligatory, shared value system, which reduces each to
“any nobody,” but in so doing, provides delusional consolation from the
unbearable messiness of human relations.
To feel like one should repay a debt before dying seems like a per-
fectly normal sentiment. Perhaps the repayment would put me in accord
with the obligatory system of exchange, contribute to a memory of my
being a “good” person, or allow me to avoid the thought that I would
have lied to the creditor when I incurred the debt? For Nietzsche, this
comment reflects resentment or revenge against the non-identical, imply-
ing subjectivity’s judgment against its own suffered socio-historical con-
ditions of possibility, against the objectivity which exceeds, conditions,
and ruptures subjectivity itself. Unable to accept the singularity of death,
Socrates seemingly incorporates that moment into the dominant obliga-
tory system of meaning, predicated on the fetishization of the exchange
of equivalencies. This, for Nietzsche, is a symptom of the historical
legacy of the ascendency of slaves’ values, which posits an unchanging
world of justice outside and above history. In effect, it is an animistic
gesture, as if conformity to the ideal of equivalency magically rectifies the
ordeal of relating to others. So, the issue is not simply that the exchange
of equivalencies is based on a faulty belief or idealism that needs to be
critiqued, or that it transcends immanence, but that it is a symptom of
a defensive need. In fact, it is fueled by a type of immediacy provided by
the conformity to the fetishized culture of the herd. As Nietzsche says in
the third essay of the Genealogy—to be discussed in Chap. 4—the ascetic
priest is not “against life,” but rather produces and affirms a certain form
of life.
Sociality, Masochism, and Dissociation: Section Seven

For some commentators, Sect. 7 of the second essay of the Genealogy
seems a bit out of place.31 However, it might be read as holding the
key to the interpretation of this second essay as a whole. Its appar-
ent theme is the inability of modern Europeans to bear suffering, par-
ticularly in comparison with premodern ancestors and non-Europeans.
However, how are we to make sense of this in the context of what many
commentators see as the central idea of the essay: that modern humans
have masochistic origins? A masochist enjoys his or her own pain, but the
modern “pessimists” described in Sect. 7 find the minutest pain to be
intolerable. This seeming contradiction is resolvable through the appeal
to the negative in Nietzsche’s understanding of history. As has been
argued, one must read between the lines of Nietzsche’s suggestion that
the conscience is merely instinctual cruelty turned inward and see it more
fundamentally as a traumatic symptom. The traumatized are often mas-
ochistic—e.g., the melancholic who punishes himself or herself in the
place of the lost other—but more fundamentally fixated or dissociated,
unable to bear aspects of suffered relationality. Timeless, compulsive, fix-
ated sadomasochism is, on a more fundamental level, a defense against
relational experience, insofar as this experience is more or less traumatic.
Moreover, the defense is shared by those unable to bear it. So, one might
say there are two paradigmatic types of suffered relationality: the dissoci-
ated suffering of the traumatized and the singular suffering of those who
can negotiate or work-through history, which the traumatized cannot
bear.32
Nietzsche suggests that modern pessimism is the result of an inability
to bear the sadomasochistic economy of credit and debt. He writes:
when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshalled against life,
as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when
people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without
making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive
lure to life. Perhaps pain—I say this to comfort the squeamish—did not
hurt as much then as it does now… (43)
But, this seeming inability to bear suffering characteristic of us mod-

erns, Nietzsche then suggests, is in reality a disguised and displaced
descendant of earlier, more direct forms of sadomasochism, such that
SOCIALITY, MASOCHISM, AND DISSOCIATION: SECTION SEVEN 97
the modern pessimist cannot recognize it in him or herself. In other

words, Nietzsche is not—as may seem—claiming that modern humans
have purified themselves of sadomasochism, but that this sadomasochism
has taken strange symptomatic forms. He writes: “Perhaps I can even be
allowed to admit the possibility that pleasure in cruelty does not really
need to have died out: perhaps, just as pain today hurts more, it needed,
in this connection, some kind of sublimation and subtilization …” (44).
The suggestion is that this inability to suffer is more properly the
expression of certain concrete socio-historical conditions and of certain
socio-historically situated models of interpreting suffering—a way of giv-
ing meaning to the suffering of a particularly weak, pessimistic, modern
way of being. There are two levels here. On the one hand, there is an
inability to concretely negotiate suffered life—the internalization, subli-
mation, and subtlization are marks of the obliteration of the ability to
struggle within suffered sociality to become what we are. On the other
hand, there is the historically situated social meaning that valorizes a cer-
tain mode of being-in-the-world, which bestows symbolic value upon
that mode of being-in-the-world. Nietzsche’s claim that giving meaning
to suffering is part of the constitution of a human being is an extension
of the abovementioned assumption that all suffering can be redeemed.
Thus, the Greeks, ancient Christians, and moderns all can be seen as giv-
ing meaning to suffering. In other words, the human is the being who
creates cultures which provide a meaning for pain. But what is “painful”
is always simultaneously a product of both more or less traumatic social
histories and dominant ideologies which define its meaning.
The modern pessimist is said to validate his or her suffering through
“sublimations and subtilizations,” symptomatic of modern social condi-
tions—urban, industrial, cosmopolitan, colonialist. For philosophers,
Nietzsche suggests, this can be seen in concepts of “free will,” “tragic
pity,” “les nostalgies de la crois,” which he explicitly mentions in this
section, but also by inference, “moral law,” “world spirit,” and other
concepts. One might also find such sublimations within myriad mani-
festations of the marketplace and bourgeois values, although these often
also imply the metaphysical conceptions of free will, teleology, and
morality. At the same time, co-original with these sublimated strategies
for providing meaning to suffering, modern humanity is also the legacy
of the Christian world and its concretely, socially reproduced fixation of
our relational histories. While “pain” and its meaning take on different
socio-historically relative concretizations, modernity carries the weight of
Judeo-Christian ressentiment, which has been transformed into a variety

of other forms.
Nietzsche’s central problem in Sect. 7 and the essay as a whole might
be formulated as follows: If suffering is constitutive of social life—
thereby being expressed in my inflicting of suffering on others and
having suffering inflicted on me—what accounts for the different symp-
tomatic forms it takes? Whence the varieties of sublimation and subtili-
zation of our sadomasochistic sociality? This question then points to
Sect. 16 and the description of the excessive, more or less traumatic,
negative moments of relationality which gave rise to bad conscience. The
appeal to trauma provides a coherent account of how suffering becomes
pathological. In contrast, appeals to some sort of power of subjectivity to
attend to the natural origins of conscience beg the question, since rela-
tionality is not primarily something “known” with greater or lesser accu-
racy, but rather borne or not borne in a complexity of ways. Relationality
is the condition of possibility reflection, and one cannot undo by reflec-
tion that which is its condition of possibility.
As Nietzsche suggests, one does not become strong merely by hav-
ing their suffering reduced; the longing for that reduction is co-opted
by ideological systems, symbolized by the ascetic priest, that are built
on promising that reduction. Also, the claim that slaves’ morality has
become victorious does not imply that those subjected to the horrors
of nature and social reality should not be helped or sympathized with,
but rather that our sympathy for them has become inverted. Instead of
responding by working to transform social conditions which produce
such horrors—an act of strength—we have simply adopted the position
of the humiliated victim from them, as if we are fixated within a cultur-
ally reproduced persecution anxiety. We have naturalized and normalized
the position of victimhood, as if the pain of not finding a good parking
spot were equivalent to living through violent occupation by colonizing
powers. Thus, the longing for the reduction of suffering is a moment
that becomes reified as a neurosis of victimhood, which has become the
dominant form of ideology: victimhood of the “powerful” who claim
the “real” victim is a persecutor. This is the victory of slaves’ morality.
Instead of a reduction of suffering, one should speak of a transformation
of culture into mournful or convalescent forms.
Nietzsche’s critique of the morality of pity implies that it simply leaves
the mode of sociality intact—the privileged and underprivileged fix-
ated in their psycho-social positions. By focusing on the core exposed
SOCIO-CULTURAL HISTORIES OF THE BAD CONSCIENCE … 99
vulnerability of the subject and the vicissitudes of that vulnerability, the

production of the fixation and its disruption becomes possible to concep-
tualize. Thus, “trauma” as the concretely and symbolically conditioned
rupture of experience takes on a more fundamental importance, as the
core of the destiny of the subject—whether privileged or victim. Our vul-
nerability or exposure is constitutive of human subjectivity as such, which
unfolds within particular socio-historical contexts, yielding particular val-
ues as defense mechanisms. The task of building a world more suitable
for such subjects would not simply amount to making poor people rich,
or the underprivileged privileged, but of creating a world in which that
exposure within more or less traumatic relational history would be shel-
tered, concretely and ideologically, from obligatory forms of ressentiment.
Socio-Cultural Histories of the Bad Conscience and Its

Inversion
One might see Sect. 338 from Gay Science as indicative of Nietzsche’s
concern with the sociality of lived existence within cultures of ressenti-
ment.33 In other words, this passage makes a gesture toward a more rela-
tional account of shame and pity, concepts closely allied with that of bad
conscience.34 Nietzsche writes:
Our personal and profoundest suffering is incomprehensible and inacces-

sible to almost everyone…But whenever people notice that we suffer, they
interpret our suffering superficially…Our “benefactors” are, more than
our enemies, people who make our worth and will smaller…one simply
knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and intricacies that are distress
[Unglück] for me or for you. The whole economy of my soul and the bal-
ance effected by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the
way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past
are shed—all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern
to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the
personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverish-
ments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me
and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it
mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptu-
ousness of one’s own hell. No, the ‘religion of pity’ (or ‘the heart’) com-
mands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when
they have helped most quickly. If you, who adhere to this religion, have
the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow man;
if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and
if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead
of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy
of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides
your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is
perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness
[Behaglichkeit]…All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly
seductive, for our ‘own way’ is too hard and demanding and too remote
from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping
from it—and from our very own conscience—to flee into the conscience of
others and into the lovely temple of the ‘religion of pity’.35
Pity is the appropriation and obliteration of the singularity of one’s suf-

fering by the herd, which provides an obligatory, common meaning for
my suffering. The point here is not internalization of instincts resulting
in self-inflicted punishment, nor is it merely in the presentation of a nat-
uralistic narrative which then supposedly disrupts our self-understanding.
Rather, it is in the social ordeal of negotiating the crux between under-
going one’s singular suffering—exposing oneself to the potential trauma
of being an outlier within the culture of ressentiment—or participating in
the socially sanctioned oblivion of singularity.
One might connect this discussion of the sadomasochistic histories of
credit–debt with Sect. 325 from The Gay Science, where Nietzsche writes:
“… Who will attain something great if he does not feel in himself the
power to inflict great pain? Being able to suffer is the least … But not to
perish of inner distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering
and hears the cry of this suffering—that is great.”36 There are two levels
to the bad name that culture bestows on suffered sociality: On the one
hand, I cannot bear inflicting suffering on others—although I do, often
in ways that can never be paid for—and on the other hand, I cannot
bear others inflicting suffering on me—although they do, often in ways
that can never be redeemed. I cannot bear being vulnerable—although
I am—and I cannot bear the vicissitudes of love and loss. Negotiating
one’s singularity involves painful distance from others—painful for me
and painful for them—and liberation, insight, and renewal are attained
through the working-through, rather than the repression of, this pain.
Dominant forces in Western history have reified this indebtedness into
an unpayable, unrealizable, unbearable debt—the maniacal release from
which is accomplished by divine forgiveness, which purports to magically
absolve me of my entanglement within suffered relationality.
NOTES 101
One might say that ressentiment is an inability to bear one’s singular-

ity, to be an outlier. It is not an inability to bear suffering that is at issue,
but the fixated inability to work-through that suffering and negotiate the
sadomasochistic social economy. Thus, for Nietzsche, “suffering” should
always be read as a social experience, and sociality should always be read
as a suffered experience. Suffered sociality is shaped not only by concrete
socio-historical conditions, but also by various forms of symbolic interpre-
tation. The implication is that some concrete social arrangements, as well
as forms of interpretation, are better than others insofar as they represent
differing levels of the ability to bear the suffering of being an outlier.
The cure for bad conscience does not simply reside in the way that
genealogy disrupts our ideas, by confounding our sense of morality and
immorality, but in fostering abilities to work-through the unpayable
debts and the irreparable suffering we inflict upon each other, which
would be the inversion of socially reproduced traumatic symptom forma-
tion. Genealogy—along with its naturalistic explanations, and its inver-
sion of our customary notions of Good and Evil—is more fundamentally
a performed working-through of the traumatic legacy of Western culture.
We all stand as products and symptoms of a more or less traumatic social
history which pervades our being in complex ways, and Nietzsche’s writ-
ing bears the marks of someone performing the struggle to bear and
work-through that history. Genealogy thus serves to contest the aura of
that fetishized value of self-obliteration, by mapping out the excessive,
potentially traumatic nature of experience. But, such mapping is only
possible by those who can bear and negotiate suffered social history; in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra and other works, this salutary potential is called
convalescence. Only convalescents can carry out genealogy.
Notes
1. See, for example, Stephen A. Mitchell. Relational Concepts in
Psychoanalysis: An Integration, and other works.
2. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. Also see J. Jackson,
Philosophy and Working-Through the Past, 73–99.
3. Mitchell, 3.
4. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Volume 16, 257–285.
5. Ibid., 275.
6. See, for example, Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The
Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, etc.
7. Nietzsche writes: “… the priestly caste and warrior caste confront one
another in jealousy and cannot agree on the prize of war … woe betide
it [the priestly-aristocratic method of valuation] when it comes to war!”
(Nietzsche 1997, 17).
8. Nietzsche writes: “We may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the
blond beast as the centre of every noble race and remain on our guard:
but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire
at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the
disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away, and the
poisoned?” (Nietzsche 1997, 24).
9. He writes: “When ressentiment does occur in the noble man himself, it
is consumed and exhausted in an immediate reaction, and therefore it
does not poison … To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and
even his misdeeds seriously for long—that is the sign of strong, rounded
natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative,
healing and can make one forget … A man like this shakes from him,
which one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another
man; actual ‘love of your enemies’ is also possible here and here alone—
assuming it is possible at all on earth. How much respect a noble man has
for his enemies! … he will tolerate as enemies none other than such as
have nothing to be despised and a great deal to be honoured! … imagine
‘the enemy’ as conceived by the man of ressentiment … as a basic idea to
which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the ‘good one’—him-
self! … ” (Nietzsche 1997, 22).
10. See Aaron Ridley’s insightful interpretation in which Nietzsche’s initial
sketching of the “internalization” of humans through the “social straight-
jacket” is “the neutral, ubiquitous form of conscience” required if man is
to live as a social animal; it provides the “calculability, regularity” that are
“fostered by the repression of his natural impulses” (18). Thus, accord-
ing to Ridley, at this basic level, conscience entails “the capacity for self-
reflection and the potential for self-transformation”(19). Ridley notes
however that Nietzsche’s discussion is ambiguous in so far as there are
moments where he calls this neutral, basic form of conscience “bad” and
suggests that it arises among the slaves, rather than the nobles—pure
artists who supposedly shape society without conscience. Ridley points
to other passages where Nietzsche makes clear that this basic form of
repression is the condition of possibility of all culture and beauty. Thus,
Ridley writes: “The pregnancy, the repression, which the ‘bad’ conscience
is in its beginnings, can go either way: it can become the bad bad con-
science of slavish ressentiment; or it can become the good bad conscience
of that affirmative, joyous, form-giving activity which Nietzsche, when
he’s straight with himself, calls nobility and mastery” (22). See Aaron
NOTES 103
Ridley, “Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt? The Second Essay of
Nietzsche’s Genealogy”.
11. See, for example, the debate between Aaron Ridley and Mathias Risse
carried out in the following articles: Aaron Ridley, “Guilt Before God,
or God Before Guilt? The Second Essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy,” and
Mathias Risse, “The Second Treatise in On the Genealogy of Morality:
Nietzsche on the Origin of Bad Conscience.”
12. To be clear, trauma, on Freud’s account, is notoriously indeterminate—
that which traumatizes me, does not necessarily traumatize you, and if
we are both traumatized, there is no simple causal trail that leads to a
particular symptom. There is a constitutive complexity to traumatic rup-
turing of experience and the way in which that rupturing manifests itself
in forms of dissociative defense. Nonetheless, there are shared traumatic
ordeals that are experienced collectively, and there are cultural processes
of giving meaning to these ordeals—in religion, for example.
13. See Hans Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis.
14. Loewald, 235.
15. See Daniel Conway, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Reader’s
Guide.
16. See Ridley, 22. He writes: “The inability to harness or discharge repressed
instinct leads to frustration and rancor—to the state Nietzsche calls res-
sentiment. And it is ressentiment that eventually gives birth to slave
morality, to the values of the bad bad conscience.” Although this is con-
sistent with the letter of Nietzsche’s own apparently causal explanation, it
abstracts from the suffered, social origins of ressentiment; on our reading
what is fundamental is not some sort of developed theory of the repres-
sion of instincts but the imbrication of suffered, embodied sociality that
conditions this “inability.”
17. Ibid.
18. Lawrence Hatab writes: “Nietzsche wants to explore new possibilities of
life-affirming values by drawing from historical sources that were deemed
‘immoral’ by traditional moral systems, but that can be redeemed as mor-
ally defensible life-values.” See Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality,
2.
19. See Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s
Genealogy.
20. David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, 144.
21. Ibid.
22. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 95.
23. Ibid., 78–79.
24. Ibid., 76–79.
25. Ibid., 80.
26. Ibid., 87.
27. In a manner similar to Deleuze’s appeal to affirmation as the ratio
essendi of the will to power, Foucault suggests that for Nietzsche, gene-
alogy implies the “unavoidable” sacrifice of the subject of knowledge.
However, despite this appeal to the destruction of the subject of knowl-
edge, Foucault’s analysis—like that of Deleuze and Derrida—makes fre-
quent use of subjective terminology. The question arises as to whether
Foucault is not begging the question as to how the historian of origins
becomes a genealogist and vice versa. In other words, how are the crude-
ness and tastelessness implicit in the historical search for origins overcome
and transformed into subversive genealogy? To these questions, Foucault
suggests two serious answers which both ignore the centrality of conva-
lescence in Nietzsche’s thinking. First, he suggests that because geneal-
ogy reveals history to be “the endlessly repeated play of dominations,” it
sets the stage for an active intervention into history. This abstract notion
of history as merely a play of power occludes convalescence. Domination
may be oppressive, and totalizing, but the fact that is can be suffered,
means that something exceeds it. Without this excess, we would not suf-
fer it, and therefore, we would not critique it. If all is domination and
the ceaseless parade of different regimes, then there would not be any
motivation for genealogy, i.e., rules must somehow be suffered if their
overthrow is desired; for Nietzsche, convalescence is the condition for the
possibility of overthrowing oppressive rules—thus, Zarathustra the con-
valescent longs for the flourishing of convalescence on the earth. Second,
Foucault attributes our inability to usurp power to the beliefs of our
fathers, giving voice to the provocative way in which Nietzsche character-
izes the weight of history inscribed within bodies. But, why then does
he designate as the cause of such suffering the “errors,” “mistakes,” or
“beliefs” of fathers? In so doing, he reduces the cause of suffered, domi-
nated bodies to thoughts. In the appeal to faulty thinking, Foucault fails
to account for the possibility of the healing of such bodies which suffer
the weight of history; on our reading, convalescence would be the condi-
tion of possibility of the ability to do genealogy as Foucault describes it.
In lieu of an account of convalescence, Foucault can only appeal to an
animism implicit in subjective traits or a type of thinking which somehow
would not succumb to the beliefs of the past.
28. Here, Conway appeals to the ascetic ideal, discussed in the third essay of
the Genealogy: “No longer content to hold himself responsible for the
finite debts he had (supposedly) incurred, the caged animal now wished
to hold himself responsible for debts that he would never repay. Having
persuaded himself of ‘his own absolute unworthiness,’ he gleefully
directed cruelty against himself, while also accepting it, penitently, as his
NOTES 105
due” (Conway, 93). This account of guilt ultimately presupposes a sort

of pragmatic subject who can take the advice of an ascetic priest and per-
suade him or herself of his or her unworthiness. On our reading, again,
there is a suffered sociality to this process on both concrete and symbolic
levels. The “feelings of worthlessness” of our ancestors were produced
within concrete social conditions of exposure and vulnerability, which
traumatically obliterated agency and left the symptom of bad conscience
as a defense mechanism.
29. In regard to this section, Hatab writes: “Nietzsche’s point seems to be
that the self-dividing character of bad conscience is given its most com-
plete expression in the binary divisions of reality in Christian thought…
With such cosmic binaries, the power of ‘fixed ideas’ is perfectly secured,
and the finitude of natural life has received its more acute antithesis. This
is why it can be said that the Christian attitude toward earthly life as such
is one of pessimism, that without a transcendent resolution natural life
is meaningless” (Hatab, 104). This is quite good as far as it goes, but
it excludes the suffered character of sociality. Christianity is of course
reproduced by concrete human beings living and suffering together, and
there are suffered, social consequences for nonconformity to its fetishized
norms and practices.
31. See Hatab, 92 and Conway, 65. Hatab calls Sect. 7 a “foray into the ques-
tion of pessimism”; Conway calls it an “exhortatory interlude.”
32. According to Conway, Sect. 7 is “an exhortatory interlude,” which argues
that “The contemporary campaign to abolish suffering” misidentifies
the fundamental problem related to human suffering: We fundamentally
desire that our suffering be meaningful, rather than seeking its abolition
(65). He suggests that Nietzsche’s main point is that we should not seek
to abolish suffering, but to follow the Greeks, who put suffering on stage
and were able to see suffering as an object of divine interest. Conway
suggests that Christianity provides a meaning for suffering, but that
Nietzsche recommends the meaning that “life itself” provides the “most
successful responses to the suffering that marks our existence” (65). On
Conway’s account, “That human beings now deem themselves unwor-
thy (or only selectively worthy) of divine interest is a far greater calam-
ity than the suffering produced by the natural instinct for cruelty” (66).
Conway fails to see that the modern aversion to suffering described by
Nietzsche is a central characteristic of Christianity, as is noted in Sect. 338
of Gay Science, discussed below. Thus, there is a more complex compat-
ibility in Nietzsche’s view between the meaning ascribed to suffering by
the Christian and the apparent modern intolerance of pain. Likewise,
it is not the case, as Conway suggests, “that human beings now deem
themselves unworthy (or only selectively worthy) of divine interest.”

Rather, they find themselves worthy of a god who obliterated himself as
creditor in order to forgive their inexhaustible guilt. In other words, their
ressentiment finds a counterpart in a divine gaze which infinitely justifies
that ressentiment. Even without a god, however, this form of social life—
crystallized in the concept of Christian love—a love outside of time and
space, which is supposed to escape from the excesses of history—lives on
in forms of symbolic identification with fetishized commodities or affec-
tively charged tribalisms.
34. Reading Sect.  7 with Sect.  48 of The Gay Science, Hatab writes:
“Nietzsche is therefore saying something much more than that comfort-
able circumstances are a blessing and that we should realize how lucky
we are to have our more ‘civilized’ misfortunes … Comfortable circum-
stances may drift so far from natural life energies, that we can be dis-
tressed about life without being endangered, indeed because we are not
endangered … the remedy … involves more experience of the actual suf-
ferings of life to break the luxurious spell of pessimism” (91). This prob-
lematically appeals to the quantity of suffering (“more experience of the
actual sufferings of life”). As we have argued, Nietzsche’s concern is
not merely with the quantity of real suffering, but also with the social-
ity of that suffering. He valorizes particular sorts of suffering not merely
because we are coddled by modern conveniences, but also because our
abilities to bear our suffering marks our singular paths to becoming our-
selves. The central point is not that comfort created by modern techno-
logical advancement produces pessimism, but that modernity embodies
the legacy of forms of Christian sociality in which an individual’s suffering
is co-opted by a meaning given to it by the herd which is readymade.
Being able to suffer does not take us back to a more authentic age or way
of being, which accords with our natural instinctual makeup; it takes us
down the path toward singularity, enabling a break from ressentiment and
the herd.
36. Ibid., 181.
CHAPTER 4
Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectic: Ascetic Ideal

and the Status Quo
This chapter offers an account of Theodor Adorno’s philosophical posi-

tion as context for a reading of various aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking,
specifically the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality.1 Both think-
ers analyze the reflexivity between the reproduction of the status quo
and the reproduction of a certain form of dissociated subjectivity—in
Nietzsche, through the tentacles of the ascetic ideal, in Adorno, through
the primacy of subjectivity. Both approaches interrogate metaphysical
independence—a conception essential to the reproduction of the status
quo—as a symptom of socio-historical dependence.
Adorno explicitly develops his negative dialectics—which preserves
subject and object as moments—in contrast with the existential and
ontological philosophy that was dominant in the twentieth century. As
this existentialist and ontological philosophy has guided much reflection
on Nietzsche’s thinking, it is valuable to reconsider Adorno’s alterna-
tive, to perhaps open up new ways of reading Nietzsche. For example,
Nietzsche is sometimes read as valorizing forms of immediate experi-
ence—in the appearance, Dionysus, amor fati, for example—and his
thinking often seems to reflect this. However, following Adorno’s cri-
tique of philosophies of immediacy, one can clearly see evidence of a
more complicated Nietzschean view in which the immediate is always
mediated. One might see Nietzsche’s critique of transcendence as a
critique of the non-dialectical fixation of the relationship between the
immediate and the mediated. Overcoming on this model is not sim-
ply a dissolution of transcendent values, but rather the reactivation

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6_4
108 4 NIETZSCHE’S NEGATIVE DIALECTIC: ASCETIC IDEAL …
of a dialectic between such values and the suffered, social life of which
they are symptomatic. Following Adorno, one might see Nietzsche’s
fragmentary style and critique of systems as expressions of a negative
dialectic.
A Nietzschean negative dialectics would not be an idealist, positive
dialectics in which the concept inevitably subsumes the negative, but
rather a dialectic in the sense that reflection is always accompanied by
moments of reflection’s own suffered rupture. This implies a form of
what Adorno calls the primacy of the object. The distinction between
subject and object does not mean “me” as opposed to the “object”; I am
both subject and object, and I suffer my objectivity. Thinking is condi-
tioned by suffered embodiedness, and without suffering, I would not be
in a world to form an idea of.
In philosophy “objectivity” is often taken epistemologically as a sub-
jective moment, and dominant critiques of identity tend to conceive of
the non-identical merely subjectively—as for example, plurality, uncon-
cealment, or difference. In Adorno’s view, such subjectivizing of the
non-identical would imply an inability to bear the object and the suffered
social histories which condition subjectivity. Some continental interpreta-
tions of Adorno’s philosophy mistakenly place him in this camp which
valorizes subjective negativity, but Adorno’s insistence on the negativ-
ity of the object implies that coherent reflection would avow that which
guides, situates, ruptures reflection within its suffered social histories.
Following Adorno, one might say that our relationship with objects is
not simply a perspectival situatedness, but rather a socially conditioned,
suffered vulnerability. We (as objects) need external objects, but are vul-
nerable to them—negotiating and defending ourselves against them, and
need is the manifestation of our own objectivity. That which transcends
the horizon of perspectival and reflective immediacy is not just darkness;
it marks a negativity which I cannot control, to which I am vulnerable,
yet which belongs inherently to my need and that which I need.
For some strains of philosophy, the idea that the concept can never be
adequate to reality points to the need for an interminable gesture on the
part of conceptualization to acknowledge its inadequacy. However, from
our perspective, the inadequacy of the concept is more fundamentally an
expression of its symptomaticity. The concept is not simply opposed to
a reality in relation to which it is inadequate, but it is a symptom of suf-
fered reality. Negative dialectics would be the form of thinking in which
the concept bears its own suffered social histories, in which the concept
4 NIETZSCHE’S NEGATIVE DIALECTIC: ASCETIC IDEAL … 109
(however necessary for human agency) bears the history of which it is

the symptom. This suggests a model of thinking as labor in which think-
ing would bear its own conditions, and in bearing such conditions, the
subject would negotiate its more or less unbearable suffered embedded-
ness in the world, without a bad conscience. Although Nietzsche seems
to valorize appearances in his critique of the transcendence of truth, he
also avows the ordeal involved in the motile traversing of appearances.
Perspectivalism is not merely a doctrine which eschews faith in transcen-
dental truths undergirding appearances; it implies the ordeal of detach-
ing from the fixatedness of certain perspectives and the interrogation of
the social reproduction of that fixatedness. Rather than a celebration of
appearance and plurality, it would be a sign for the ordeal of losing cher-
ished perspectives.
Nietzsche’s critique of transcendence is more appropriately a critique
of dominant forms of fixated sociality that are reproduced through the
socially reproduced obliteration of history. Dominant forms of tran-
scendence are symptoms of such social forms, and their critique implies
concrete negotiation of the loss of those forms. The critique of “God,”
for example, entails a contradiction with what family, friends, and, or the
community hold to be sacred. This contradiction, if it is to be made pub-
lic and gives rise to meaningful social transformation, must be borne and
worked-through. Moreover, the latter would require facilitating environ-
ments.
In a manner similar to Adorno (as well as, from a certain perspec-
tive, similar to Marx and Freud), Nietzsche offers a type of critique that
does not find its source within a spontaneous core of the subject—which
would simply reproduce the problematic form of subjectivity that pro-
voked the critique—but rather within the imbrication of the subject
with its suffered, social history. If Ricoeur sees Nietzsche as valorizing an
ascesis of accommodating oneself to necessity, Adorno reminds us that
necessity—as the object—is always already conditioning the subject that
would supposedly do the accommodating. The subject is an object and
is already confronting or accommodating itself to the object. Coherent
reflection interrogates and negotiates that non-identical, suffered objec-
tivity which has given rise to reflection and remains calcified within it.
This negative dialectic would potentially, momentarily activate the sub-
ject that is able to work-through its suffered conditions of possibility and
imply an imperative that the social conditions that mediate the subject be
changed. In other words, there is not a subjective denial of necessity that
can be overcome with a contrasting acceptance or accommodation, but

rather an objective social mediation of necessity that has always already
conditioned the subject and needs to be worked out of.
Reading Nietzsche in Light of Adorno’s

Philosophical Position
In Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, reflection’s self-critique leads it to the
primacy of the object, which expresses both the conditioning and the
rupturing of reflection. One might say that reflection arises as a symp-
tom of suffered social histories that inevitably rupture that reflection. In
conceptualizing the object, coherent thinking avows the primacy of the
negative which conditions the concept and marks its limit as a moment
within the ordeal of social history. On the one hand, one should read
Adorno’s critique of the contemporary philosophy of his time from this
perspective. What is often seen as a repetitive, unwarranted critique of
phenomenology can be seen as reflection’s labor to work itself out of the
neurosis by which it feigns its independence from history, through posit-
ing of some sort of animated subjectivity. In this way, Adorno critiques
philosophy’s complicity in the status quo and points toward the possibil-
ity of the progressive transformation of social conditions. On the other
hand, this critique of reflection is implied in Adorno’s analysis of mass
culture, which offers fetishized forms of reflection as symptoms of the
mass reproduction of the inability to bear history.2 Here, negative dia-
lectics would be a form of reflection in which the maniacal subjectivity
reproduced by mass culture is situated within the suffering that condi-
tions and ruptures it, implying a recalibration of norms that would reflect
an imperative to create a better world, more conducive to the working-
through of history and bearing the negative.
Negative Dialectics is largely constituted by critiques of philosophy
from Kant to Adorno’s contemporaries. It is hard to read it (in the con-
text of other texts in which Adorno critiques the dominant philosophy
of his time) without being struck by an almost obsessive need to criticize
Heidegger. One might also include Husserl here, although, Adorno’s
repeated return to Husserl seems a bit more evenhanded. One com-
mon way of interpreting this is in the context of the fact that Adorno
was aware of Heidegger’s ties to political conservatism, such that his
obsession would be the effect of deeper emotional and political concerns
READING NIETZSCHE IN LIGHT OF ADORNO’S PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION 111
rather than philosophical ones. In other words, it would amount to an

implicit, drawn-out ad hominem argument. For example, one commen-
tator suggests that Adorno’s reading of Heidegger comes down to an
illegitimate equating of Heidegger’s thinking of Being with a Platonist
distinction between appearance and essence, which uses neologisms
meant to evoke a direct experience of the essence:
The problem with this critique is that Heidegger never reduces thinking
to such simple gesturing. Behind the self-evidence with which we use the
word ‘Being’ in predication stands an enigma that can only be approached
through an interrogation of the entity for which Being is an issue, namely
Dasein in its everydayness. The ‘forgotten’ question of the meaning of
Being requires an anamnesis of the ordinary and the everyday.3
Here, the claim is that Adorno caricatures Heidegger’s thinking, when

in fact that thinking is guided by a concern that is purportedly very close
to Adorno’s. Both Heidegger and Adorno—so the story goes—critique
identity thinking, attempting to do justice to the non-identical, which
has somehow been “forgotten.”
However, this account of Adorno’s critique of identity thinking—specifi-
cally in regard to Negative Dialectics—misses Adorno’s insistence on the pri-
macy of the object that accounts for the negativity of the dialectic. Adorno’s
problem with Heidegger is not simply that he is a Platonist who fetishizes
language, but that his philosophy expresses an allergy to the object and places
primacy on the subject—albeit in the purified form of Dasein as the being
who asks the question of being.4 In other words, Adorno might openly grant
that Heidegger, as well as many of his followers and critics, is attempting to
think the non-identical, in the form of Dasein’s ex-stasis, for example. The
problem is that, in Adorno’s view, this is an understated domestication of the
non-identical, which expresses and reproduces the status quo.5 For Adorno,
the non-identical is objective—both suffered and socio-historically condi-
tioned, conditioning and rupturing subjectivity. To characterize it merely as
a forgotten aspect of everydayness is to conceive of it subjectively, as some-
thing retrievable through questioning, choosing, heeding, or being recep-
tive or silent. From Adorno’s perspective, this is a subjectivization of the
object, which operates as a symptom of the inability to bear the non-identical
inherent in suffered sociality—an inability inherent in the status quo. From
Adorno’s perspective, Heideggerian philosophy reflects the status quo by val-
orizing a form of defensive subjectivity which mass society reproduces.6
For Adorno, there is no animating force within a subject that might

override the negative and magically lead to liberation.7 At the same time,
there is no corresponding praxis, being, existence, body, or dynamism
that lies outside of thinking, upon which an authentic philosophy could
be based, since the conceptualization of any such outside implies that it
is always already reflected upon; that outside of thought as the non-iden-
tical, or negative, asserts itself only as the suffered, embodied rupture of
thought. In Negative Dialectics, this position implies a criticism of Kant,
Hegel, Heidegger, existentialism, and other dominant forms of philoso-
phy that Adorno discusses to articulate his own position.8
To be fair, there are passages in Negative Dialectics that do seem to
be consistent with the valorization of this subjectivist critique of identity.
Adorno writes, for example: “Because the fundamental character of every
general concept dissolves before the determinate existent, philosophy
may no longer hope for totality” (Adorno 1966, 138), and “Dialectics
amounts … to a thinking wherein the form of thought no longer turns
its objects into immutable things … ” (Adorno 1966, 154). One might
say that, for Adorno, concepts are insufficient and need to be decon-
structed, for example; however, that would just be one moment within
a negative dialectics. Concepts, in their positing of identity, come with
historical authority; they are not just metaphysical illusions or inadequate
simplifications that somehow block difference; rather the conceptual pos-
iting of identity is the expression of socio-historically conditioned need,
and its critique must be conceived as a grappling or working-through of
its history. The existent not only exceeds the concept, but conditions it.
Adorno writes:
The mediation of essence and appearance, of concept and thing, does not
remain what it was either, the moment of subjectivity in the object. What
mediates the facts is not so much the subjective mechanism which pre-
forms and renders them, as the objectivity, heteronomous to the subject…
it would give the object what is its own, instead of being satisfied with the
false copy, only where it resisted the average value of such objectivity and
made itself free as a subject…the overwhelming power of what is objec-
tivated in subjects, which then prevents them from becoming subjects,
equally prevents the cognition of what is objective… (Adorno 1966, 170)
Social history reproduces that which is objectivated in subjects, which

then prevents them from becoming coherent subjects; the reified form of
subjectivity is a defense mechanism which reproduces the status quo. In

Nietzsche’s language, this condemns the subject to obligatory forms of
ressentiment and consolation, whereas convalescent subjectivity “would
give the object what is its own.”
In Adorno’s appropriation of a certain form of Marx’s critique of
the subject, he takes issue with aspects and interpretations of that cri-
tique which rely on concepts of alienation, reification, and praxis.9
Nonetheless, on Adorno’s reading, Marx’s analyses preserve the “thingly
alien.” As discussed in the Introduction, in The German Ideology, the
modern subject only appears after the violent reproduction of the divi-
sion of labor, which creates an intellectual class. The latter, which posits
identity and equivalence—the basis of conceptual meaning, and there-
fore of morality and self-consciousness—is enabled by the non-identical,
which the moral subject’s identifying consciousness cannot bear to avow.
Adorno writes:
Since intellectual labor was separated from the manual kind in the sign of
the domination of Spirit, of the justification of privilege, the divided Spirit
was obliged, with the exaggeration due to a bad conscience, to vindicate
precisely that domination-claim, which it derived from the thesis that it
would be the first and originary, and that is why it takes pains to forget
from which its claim comes, if it is not to crumble. Deep down the Spirit
suspects that its stable rule is not at all that of the Spirit, but possesses
its ultima ratio in the physical violence at its disposal. It may not utter its
secret, at the price of its own downfall. (Adorno 1966, 177)
This quote could apply to Marx or Nietzsche. For the former, the
non-identical as the division of labor produces the subject guided by
the principle of identity to maintain and stabilize the system of power.
Identity thinking, or the domination of Spirit, is the expression of this
inability to bear the history of violence. For the latter, the domination
of Spirit would be reflected in the victory of the ascetic priest and ideal,
which reproduce a perverse need for the identical (and equivalencies)
as an expression of the inability to bear and negotiate the suffering for
which the priest offers consolation. Nietzsche thereby identifies the per-
verse sadomasochism which pervades dominant forms of spirituality and
morality.
This is not merely the assertion of a metaphysical view, or a positiv-
istically conceived history of human beings, rather it is positioned as an
assertion of the primacy of the suffered, social history of a subject which

has somehow come to define itself as primarily ahistorical, asocial, and
abstracted from embodied suffering. For Marx, the subject’s genealogy
leads back to a history of socially conditioned need structured by the
creation of a division of labor. The latter, however, is not merely some
sort of pragmatically created state of affairs which happened in the past.
Rather, it signifies the suffered social excess of history which produced,
and continues to reproduce, the modern subject as its symptom. The
abject history of the primitive accumulation of capital, which enabled
intellectual labor, is the condition of possibility of the creation of the sys-
tem of commodity exchange and hence, as Adorno implies, the condi-
tion of possibility of identity thinking. The non-identical, as the suffered
historical process of creating a system of class domination, is the condi-
tion of possibility of identity thinking—upon which the modern subject
is based.
From Adorno’s perspective, rather than constituting the object, the
subject is a symptom of the object. Dominance, derived from this con-
cretely reproduced social distinction between manual and intellectual
labor, is expressed as ideology of the primacy of a subject that has magi-
cally escaped from the social history of which it is a symptom. The non-
identity implicit in the origin of the division of labor is evoked by Marx
as the myth of primitive accumulation and the expropriation of the agri-
cultural population from the land.10 The myth implies the principle of
identity, by which those who have accumulated capital earned it through
an equivalent expenditure of energy, labor, and ingenuity; those with-
out capital, forced to sell their labor for wages, are similarly deserving
of this state of affairs because of their laziness. The myth reinscribes the
principle of identity and equivalencies, which establishes the justice of
the status quo, and thereby serves as a defense against suffered history.
Therefore, the critique of the myth, which traces the division of labor to
the forced expropriation of the land, works by asserting the non-identical
excess which guides social history. The latter is not reducible to a meta-
physical system which would guarantee a historical trajectory toward jus-
tice, but rather the condition of possibility of such a system. The myth
is then a form of ideology symptomatic of an inability to bear the non-
identical at the heart of modern consciousness. As Adorno suggests, ide-
ology is not merely a faulty way of thinking, but rather the expression of
an allergy toward the negative that is socio-historically reproduced within
the dominant form of subjectivity.
For Adorno, the distinction between subject and object is constitutive

of reflection, because it is historically reproduced as the expression of the
non-identical:
It is easy for the polarity of subject and object to appear for its part as
an undialectical structure, in which all dialectics is supposed to take place.
But both concepts are originated (derived) categories of reflection (ent-
sprungene Reflexions-kategorien), formulations for something which is not
to be unified; not anything positive, nor any primary matter-at-hand, but
negative throughout, the expression solely of non-identity. In spite of this
the difference between subject and object is for its part not to be simply
negated. They are neither the ultimate duality, nor does the ultimate unity
hide behind them. (Adorno 1966, 174)
Adorno claims that the distinction between subject and object originated
in non-identity, i.e., it does not have a metaphysical origin that could be
identified. One can compare this to Nietzsche’s tracing of the geneal-
ogy of the subject back to suffered, social histories. In contrast to the
usual use of these terms to articulate the presupposed subject’s epistemol-
ogy, Adorno’s usage suggests an understanding of “objectivity” as our
suffered materiality, from which subjectivity inclusive of its epistemology
emerges. From this perspective, “objectivity” is not merely a cognitive
index but a suffered index, in so far as it expresses our ability to negotiate
our suffered social situatedness.
This parallels the reading of Nietzsche developed above insofar as
subjectivity is the expression of the non-identical as suffered, social
history. The dominant form of subjectivity and its supposed founda-
tion in free will and access to truth is not merely a metaphysical illusion
that can be overcome, but rather is symptomatic of the abjectness of
human sociality. There are many passages that suggest that Nietzsche
does not propose a rejection of this distinction between subject and
object—a distinction that is materially reproduced—and therefore can-
not be overcome with a philosophy. This is evident in the position of the
convalescent whose concepts fail within a suffered confrontation with
the non-identical. Beyond appeal to Nietzsche’s most-often repeated
concepts—Will to Power, Dionysus, Eternal Return, etc.—this work
of convalescence is expressed in his fragmentary, aphoristic grappling
with finite, limited, varied memories, feelings, thoughts. In “On Truth
and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” Nietzsche says that “ … between
two absolutely different spheres, such as subject and object are, there
is no causality, no correctness, no expression, but at most an aesthetic
way of relating, by which I mean an allusive transference, a stammer-
ing translation into quite a different language.”11 Elsewhere, he sug-
gests that Schopenhauer’s philosophy demotes “physicality to the status
of illusion … similarly pain, plurality, the whole conceptual antith-
esis ‘subject’ and ‘object’—errors, nothing but errors! To renounce
faith in one’s own ego (Ich), to deny one’s own ‘reality’ to oneself—
what a triumph!—and not just over the senses, over appearance, a
much higher kind of triumph, an act of violation and cruelty inflicted
on reason … ascetic self-contempt decrees the self-ridicule of reason:
‘there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is firmly excluded from
it!’” (Nietzsche 1997, 86). This would suggest a reading whereby
Nietzsche’ critique of the subject—and the dominant epistemological
and moral frames within which that subject are understood—does not
reject the distinction between subject and object as does Schopenhauer.
Rather, Nietzsche could be read as maintaining the necessity of the
subjective moment, albeit as complexly mediated by the object.
On the one hand, it would be a mistake to read Nietzsche as
claiming that the distinction between subject and object is a contin-
gent social construction that can be cast away within an upsurge of
Dionysian affirmation—as if there were a magical mode of existence
which takes us outside of our concepts and the repressive world of the
cognitive subject. On the other hand, it is not simply that any given
conceptual structure is historically constituted, such that we are either
condemned to think within a particular frame or find ways to “think
outside the box.” This would imply that we could create new concepts
and think in other ways that allow us to escape a supposedly perni-
cious distinction between subject and object—e.g., in terms of forces,
intensities, temporalities, or difference. Both of these views presuppose
some sort of internal or external animating force which either “affirms”
or “thinks” differently. On our reading, his view of this distinction
between subject and object has a greater socio-historical complexity.
In Genealogy, as we have seen, the subject—and hence the distinction
between subject and object—is a symptom of a concrete socio-histori-
cal scenes.
Coherent reflection (reflection as taking account of the conditions
of possibility of reflection) is a reflection on the objective mediation
of that reflection. To repress this, and posit a realm of unmediated
thinking or being, would not magically do away with the objective

mediation, but contributes to reflection’s complicity in the status quo
as the inability to bear and negotiate suffered, social contradiction.
Reflection’s taking account of itself does not magically produce free-
dom, but is an expression of the ability to bear and work-through con-
tradiction, and as such an expression would contribute to the work of
cultural convalescence.
There are similarities between Nietzsche’s thinking and Adorno’s
insistence that subjectivity, coherently conceived, can only be thought
of in the context of a primacy of the object. The latter is not an alter-
native metaphysics or a materialist ontology, but rather the form of
the coherent account of the possibility of subjectivity. Paralleling
Nietzsche’s critique of the “pure subject,” for Adorno, the more puri-
fied the conception of the subject (as transcendental or as ontologi-
cal being-in-the-world, for example), the more the subject becomes an
object, conditioned by society.12 Adorno writes that “In the intellec-
tual supremacy of the subject, its real powerlessness has its echo … its
desperate self-exaltation is the reaction to the experience of its power-
lessness, which prevents self-reflection … ” (Adorno 1966, 179). The
claimed purity reflects its attempt to defend itself from its imbrication
within constellations of suffered sociality. The quest for purity is acqui-
escence to the status quo, despite its aversion for the latter. In contrast,
negative dialectics strive to interrogate the impurity of the subject in
the constellations which condition subjectivity, thereby implicitly con-
testing the status quo which bears down on the subject. As sympto-
matic of social history, clarifying the subject’s impurity enables the
potential transformation of that history. In contrast, the insistence on
purity—and on the supremacy of identity and exchange—implies the
renunciation of agency and the production of a magical subjectiv-
ity. In other words, one might say that Adorno valorizes a subjectivity
that is essentially convalescent or mournful, taking the form of avow-
ing and working-through the ordeal of its embodied, socially situated
objectivity. Coherent reflection expresses the possibility of the freedom
of the subject. The subject’s acknowledgement of its own mediation
works against the status quo of obliterated subjectivity expressed by
obligatory forms of reflection as magic. Therefore, for Adorno, “The
insight into the mediatedness of thinking by means of objectivity does
not negate thinking and the objective laws by which it is thinking … ”
(Adorno 1966, 180).
Adorno writes:
The regression of consciousness is the product of its lack of self-reflection.

It has the capacity to see through the identity-principle, but cannot be
thought without the identification; every determination is an identifica-
tion. But precisely this approaches what the object is, as non-identical: by
stamping it, it wishes to be stamped by it. Non-identity is secretly the telos
of the identification, it is what is to be rescued in the latter; the mistake of
traditional thought is that identity held for its goal…It is hubris…that the
thing in itself would correspond to its concept. But its ideal is not to be
simply thrown away: in the reproach that the thing would not be identical
with the concept lives too the longing that it would like to be so. (Adorno
1966, 150)
Adorno is not merely offering an alternative to a magical identity-posit-

ing subject, since that subject testifies to the constitutive human resist-
ance to being reduced to nature; the moment of imagination sparked by
the unbearable character of the object is constitutive, as is the primacy
of the non-identical which undergirds, conditions, and ruptures the con-
cept, the imagined identity. Human subjectivity, on Adorno’s model,
includes both moments of this magical longing for identity and the inevi-
table, necessary failure and rupture of this longing by that which it wants
to identify. This is the constitutive contradiction at the heart of think-
ing: It is the case neither that the concept will correspond with the thing
in-itself, nor that we could somehow think the object outside of the
concept, e.g., in its being. Thinking wants to identify the object which
it cannot do not because of some sort of limit to its cognitive powers
that only God would have, but because the object as the non-identical
exceeds any status as an object of cognition—it is socio-historically suf-
fered.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche presents a similar critique of the
dominant philosophies of his time. Nietzsche’s critique of transcendence
has a socio-historical significance—it is the dominant form of group life
as such, the libidinal fetishization of which keeps the herd together. In
contrast with the common view that the herd is the group which posits
transcendence, the argument developed here suggests that transcendence
is a symptom of the suffered social history of the herd. What constitutes the
herd is its suffered history, not its metaphysical beliefs, which are symp-
toms of that history. This history cannot be undone through a critique
or a new way of thinking, but, as suggested above, only through the

relentless, interminable working-through of that suffered social history.
The allure of transcendence is the allure of the herd, which arises from
the unbearable character of history. Nietzsche writes:
…We know all too well how offensive it sounds when someone classi-
fies human beings as animals, without disguises and allegory; and we are
considered almost sinful for constantly using expressions like ‘herd,’ and
‘herd instinct’ with direct reference to people of ‘modern ideas’…People
in Europe clearly know what Socrates claimed not to know, and what that
famous old snake once promised to teach,–people these days ‘know’ what
is good and evil. Now it must sound harsh and strike the ear quite badly
when we keep insisting on the following point: what it is that claims to
know here, what glorifies itself with its praise and reproach and calls itself
good is the instinct of the herd animal man, which has come to fore, gain-
ing and continuing to gain predominance and supremacy over the other
instincts, in accordance with the growing physiological approach and
approximation whose symptom it is…it stubbornly and ruthlessly declares:
‘I am morality itself and nothing else is moral!’13
A particular form of modern delusion takes the form of self-certainty,

positing magical agency as a symptom of the inability to bear the other,
the unknown, and the more or less traumatic. People of modern ideas
are symptomatic of suffered social histories that have produced fixated
defenses calcified as various forms of a subjectivity which imagines itself
purified of its objectivity, such that modernity is dominated by different
forms of obedience—the tentacles of the ascetic ideal—which reproduce
the status quo. As in Adorno, the critique of ideology is a critique of
consciousness; magical subjectivity with a bad conscience expresses and
reproduces the status quo—in mass culture, morality, science, and philos-
ophy.
A string of other passages in Beyond, Good, and Evil give a sense of
how—in a manner similar to Adorno—Nietzsche’s critique of the mod-
ern philosophical assessment of subjectivity is also a critique of the status
quo. Specifically, Nietzsche addresses the valorization of living in accord
with nature, of “objective” philosophy, and of “scepticism.” These can
be read as symptomatic pathologies—variations of the ascetic ideal—that
reproduce the status quo, in contrast to the movement of convalescence
and genealogy which signify the negatively dialectical negotiation of the
object. These pathologies can be read as expressions of the ascetic ideal
and the socially reproduced desubjectivization and “loss of self” that

serve the status quo. For Nietzsche, philosophy becomes a symptomatic
ploy to convince oneself that one is not mediated by suffered objectivity.
For Nietzsche, the philosophical imperative to live “according to
nature” is a contradiction in terms, since human subjectivity is precisely
constituted by the desire to escape from nature.14 In other words, there
is no “nature” that is not always already mediated by socially conditioned
subjectivity. In this context, by “nature,” philosophers really mean nature
as expressive of their socially conditioned need. To live in accord with
it would be to acquiesce to the status quo and to forego the burden of
genealogical reflection. As the contradiction between subjectivity and
objectivity is constitutive of reflection, the desire to live in accord with
nature is a desire to avoid and thereby defend oneself against this suf-
fered contradiction. Put another way, it would be to regress to a sort of
Kleinian paranoid–schizoid position, at the mercy of, and as an expres-
sion of, a socially mediated upsurge of nature. The distinction between
subject and object is as Adorno says the expression of the non-identical;
the desire to directly bypass subjectivity and go directly to nature or the
object is a nihilistic expression of the inability to bear what we are.
Nietzsche also critiques the philosophical valorization of an exagger-
ated passivity in regard to the object. Here, Nietzsche’s critique of the
“objective person” might be read with Adorno’s critique of later phe-
nomenology, which could be seen as an overreaction to the metaphysical
philosophy of the subject. Although there is value in critiquing the sub-
ject, Nietzsche suggests that one must be wary of “the desubjectivization
and depersonification of spirit, as if this were some sort of goal in itself,
some sort of redemption and transfiguration.”15 He writes:
The objective man is really a mirror: he is used to subordinating himself

in front of anything that wants to be known…He waits until something
comes along and then spreads himself gently towards it, so that even light
footsteps and the passing by of a ghostly being are not lost on his sur-
face and skin. He has so thoroughly become a passageway and reflection of
strange shapes and events, that whatever is left in him of a ‘person’ strikes
him as accidental, often arbitrary, and still more often as disruptive…he
is wrong about his basic needs…he is cheerful, not for lack of needs but
for lack of hands to grasp his neediness…he is only a gentle, brushed-off,
refined, agile pot of forms, who first has to wait for some sort of content
or substance in order ‘to shape’ himself accordingly,–he is generally a man
without substance of content, a ‘selfless’ man…16
This might be applied in part to Husserl’s descriptive passivity before the

things themselves, Heidegger’s valorization of silence and receptivity and
Levinas’s ethics of being undone by the Other. Here, there is a waiting
for the object that coincides with Nietzsche’s comments in Genealogy
discussed below on the ascetic ideal and the “loss of self” whereby a
sort of animistic, minimal element of spontaneity exists, but is conceived
ahistorically as a power to be “receptive” and “open” that is dissociated
from socio-historically conditioned need. Similarly, Nietzsche suggests
that skepticism is symptomatic of an allergy to objectivity, which protects
the status quo and silences pessimism in regard to social organization:
“Skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physio-
logical condition which in laymen’s terms is called weak nerves or a sickly
constitution.”17 Skepticism is a type of symptom of cultural pathology he
calls “paralysis of the will.” Since will is for Nietzsche a complex socio-
historically conditioned process, “paralysis” would imply sickly socio-his-
torical conditions.
There is also a notable similarity between Adorno’s critique of iden-
tity and Nietzsche’s critique of the positing of the system of credit and
debt—discussed in Chap. 3—at the core of morality and the modern
subject, which also gestures toward the negativity of suffered sociality
which has no equivalent, and hence cannot be redeemed. The positing
of a responsible subject implies a metaphysical system based on the prin-
ciple of identity. For Nietzsche, such positing can be read as a defense
against unbearable excess, or negativity, of history. At the same time, in
Nietzsche, as in Adorno, this fetishization of identity cannot be abstractly
negated, as if Dionysus or the body could replace it in a new form of
experience. As has been argued, Nietzschean convalescence and geneal-
ogy can be read as the suffered working-through of the need for identity,
which might be seen as a proto-negative dialectics.
For Adorno, the type of reflection that would do justice to the pri-
macy of the object would look for constellations. Adorno writes: “The
only knowledge which can unleash the history in the object, is that
which is aware of the historical positional value of the object in its rela-
tionship to others … The cognition of the object in its constellation is
that of the process, which it has stored up within itself … ” (Adorno
1966, 163). Like the distinction between subject and object, within
which the object has primacy, the motivation for reflection on constel-
lations comes from the non-identical: “… not merely the critique of
epistemology, but the real course of history necessitates the search for
constellations … ” (Adorno 1966, 166). In other words, Adorno takes

pains not to slide back into the dominant subjectivist paradigm, which
would posit some sort of animistic source of reflection. The primacy of
the object governs both what is reflected upon and the reflecting itself.
Thinking about constellations is not merely a valorized method, model,
or strategy, nor is it a moral position that would contrast with some pur-
portedly “immoral” identity thinking. Rather, in a certain way, Adorno is
following the precedent set by the critiques of morality of Marx, Freud,
and Nietzsche. As has been suggested, these thinkers can be read as plac-
ing a primacy on suffered, social scenes of which subjectivity—conceived
as the source of awareness and action—is a symptom; for these think-
ers as in Adorno, reflecting on history entails the peculiar challenge of
reflecting on that which conditions and ruptures reflection.
The constellation can be thought as a relationship between identi-
fied “things,” since thinking is identifying. It is precisely in the relation-
ship between things that the non-identical in the objects can resonate;
the relatedness exceeds the identical and exceeds the posited totality of
equivalencies. This resonates with the theories of Klein and Winnicott,
to be discussed in Chap. 5. In the latter, the negotiation of the relations
between objects takes place in a transitional space, ambiguously both cre-
ated and found, projected and introjected at the same time. Within the
constellation, as such a space, the compulsion of identity thinking (and
hence the aversion to the non-identical) is reproduced by the under-
going of the non-identical. Identity thinking is not merely wrong or
immoral thinking, but the expression of a need.
Thinking in constellations does not assume a free-willing, epistemic
subject capable of awareness and spontaneous action, which would
respond to suffering, or to some alleged pernicious totality and iden-
tity thinking, by thinking in constellations. Rather, the concept of the
constellation captures the objectivity of the subject, its suffered social
histories, which are its conditions of possibility. Therefore, to think in
constellations would be to bear that which history and mass culture con-
dition us to be unable to bear; it implies an ability to bear and negotiate
our situatedness within wrong life and the way in which that wrong life
has been congealed within us. It implies the ability to bear that which
motivates, conditions, and ruptures the compulsion to identify and
equate. Negative dialectics is therefore not merely a method one can
pick up from a philosophical toolbox and apply. Rather, it would entail
the labor evoked by Adorno’s description of a serious working-through
of the past which mass culture (understood through the culture industry
as well as the fascist tendencies of modern democracies) militates against.
To reflect on constellations would be to bear the non-identical, to devi-
ate from the fetishization of identity thinking and the fetishized system
of equivalences, which works as a culturally shared defense mechanism
against the non-identical.
The imbrication of embodied, suffered, sociality and history discussed
in the Introduction might be read as the expression of the primacy of
constellations—positions, situatedness, and scenes in which objects relate
to each other and from which subjectivity emerges. The constellation
might also be conceived as a suffered scene, not something that has been
forgotten—but rather something that is more or less unbearably abject.
Adorno writes: “… there is indeed a fallible, yet immediate experience
of the essential and inessential, which the scientific need for order can
talk the subjects out of only with violence. Where such an experience
does not occur, cognition remains immobile and fruitless. Its measure
is, what the subjects experience objectively as their suffering” (Adorno
1966, 169). The suffering of the object in its imbricated relationships
with others is not merely to be morally condemned, but is constitutive of
the socio-historically mediated subject. Suffering expresses the implicit-
ness of non-identical within the identical; the primacy of suffered social
histories gives rise to the concept, the positing of identity as a desire for
adequacy that always fails. Suffered excess motivates subjective conceptu-
alizations, which are constitutively haunted by the suffered histories that
motivate and rupture them; ideology as implied within identity think-
ing and the constitutive consciousness rests on the ability or inability to
work-through that suffering. Identity thinking arises from constellations
of object relations, marked by suffering. In this case, fear and inability
to bear and negotiate the other reproduce xenophobia.18 This can be
read with Nietzsche’s identification of xenophobia at the heart of slaves’
morality, which reproduces an inability to negotiate the other in myriad
forms of the ascetic ideal.
In effect, Adorno provides another frame from which to reflect on the
sociality of metaphysics and in so doing an alternative path to approach
Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. Standard readings of Nietzsche
often seem to posit a false choice: Either one believes in the illusion of
metaphysical stasis, or one explodes this illusion with a revelation of
eternal dynamism. But, to recruit Nietzsche for such a view would do
violence to his varied tracing of the suffered sociality which guides the
need for metaphysics. The popular claim that Nietzsche’s thinking can
be reduced to an exhortation to dance, play, and the exuberant or heroic
transgression of metaphysics may express more about problems with con-
temporary philosophy than it does about Nietzsche. As Adorno says of
idealism, such philosophy often converts real suffering into a philosophi-
cal critique of metaphysics—in so doing, they serve the cause of repro-
ducing the crisis they long to ameliorate, by expressing an inability to
bear their own histories. One might say that Nietzsche contributes to the
outlining of a coherent, negatively dialectical form of reflection—reflec-
tion which traces its own suffered conditions of possibility, which leave
their mark in the symptomatic character of thinking itself.
Adorno might be read as implicitly addressing a common interpreta-
tion of Nietzsche as positing a metaphysical dynamism—in the Will to
Power or Dionysus, for example. Adorno writes:
The woe lies in the relationships which damn human beings to power-
lessness and apathy and yet would have to be changed by them; not pri-
marily in human beings and the manner in which relationships appear to
them…Those who regard the thingly as what is radically evil; who would
like to dynamize everything, which is, into pure contemporaneity, tend to
be hostile towards the other, the alien, whose name does not resound in
alienation for nothing; to that non-identity, which would need to be eman-
cipated not solely in consciousness but in a reconciled humanity. Absolute
dynamics however would be that absolute handling of the facts, which
violently satisfies itself and misuses the non-identical as its mere occasion.
(Adorno 1966, 189)
In placing primacy on suffered relationality, Adorno suggests that appeals

to dynamism sanctify a possibly violent inability to negotiate the non-
identical. Any such valorization of dynamism—as play of forces or dif-
ference, for example—would not amount to a subversion of the status
quo, as an experience which would transgress metaphysical structures of
permanence. Rather, it would amount to a regressive defense against the
more or less traumatic suffering of one’s sociality. In contrast to those
who find a sanctification of dynamism in Nietzsche, one might see the
concepts of convalescence and genealogy as signs of a negative dialectic
in which thinking (as the longing for identity) confronts the non-identi-
cal which is its condition of possibility, in which the subject confronts its
objectivity. Similarly, the concept of the Will to Power might be thought
along with the situated aphorisms of the published texts, such that the
ebb and flow of forces can be read as a representation of the subject’s
negotiation of its own socially mediated objectivity.
In many cases, one might read Nietzsche’s fragments as sketches of
constellations within which subjectivity is shaped. In thinking in constel-
lations, reflection grounded in the object’s primacy activates subjectivity,
which becomes coherent by tracing its own history. Fragmentary writing
would be an expression of the bit-by-bit process of working through that
which mediates the immediate, wherever one finds oneself thinking and
valuing. This would be a tracing of the way in which suffered history
conditions and ruptures the subjective.
As a point of contrast, one might consider Michel Haar’s characteri-
zation of Nietzschean genealogy as “… an art of deciphering symptoms
ad infinitum … the fragmented, aphoristic, and bursting character of the
text corresponds to Nietzsche’s own grasp of the world: a world scat-
tered in pieces, covered with explosions … a world freed from the ties
of gravity (i.e. from a relationship with a foundation); a world made of
moving and light surfaces where the incessant shifting of masks in named
laughter, dance, game.”19 In contrast, our Adornian reading the frag-
mented, aphoristic, and bursting character of the text corresponds with
the suffered ordeal of negotiating or working-through slave morality, as
the legacy of an ongoing suffered, embodied social history. If geneal-
ogy and Nietzsche’s thinking in general are the reflective grappling with
reflection’s own limit, it must take up this limit wherever it is encoun-
tered, in the working through of its own symptoms, its own ressentiment.
Although this takes place on the edges of identity wherever it is found,
concepts are not merely ideal objects that signify and reproduce a stable,
grounded, ethical world, which critiques can then “explode.” Although
Haar acknowledges that concepts are also guarantors of gregariousness,
his account occludes the suffered social context of the critique Nietzsche
supposedly valorizes. A world scattered in pieces must be borne.
Concepts are not symptomatic of abstractly conceived impulses or
forces, but of socio-historically conditioned need. To explode a cherished
concept would be to endure loss of love; to problematize the identity
upon which a concept is based entails an ordeal of disrupting the soci-
ality grounded in the shared concepts. This would not take place all at
once—as if the world would be free from the ties of gravity—and would
only be a moment in a more complexly suffered ordeal.
Despite the avowal of the gregarious, conformist character of the con-

cept, Haar’s interpretation contains a subtle privileging of a metaphysical
interpretation of Nietzsche’s thinking, albeit a metaphysics of non-iden-
tity (e.g., the world is … forces, impulses), as if the critique of metaphys-
ics would lead to a new form of sociality. Again, taking the lead from
Marx’s characterization of reflection as arising from violent divisions of
labor, one might read Nietzsche as privileging concrete social histories,
such that metaphysics and its critique are symptoms of a particular, con-
tradictory social history. The ability to negotiate the ordeal of this con-
tradictory history would be the condition of possibility of the critique.
For Haar, Nietzsche’s use of language functions
above all to burst open some traditionally accepted identity (e.g. Will,
Ego, Man)…the dominant words of Nietzsche’s discourse (especially Will
to Power and Eternal Return) are meant to subvert, fracture, and dismiss
concepts...his overall effort is one aiming to set the entire logical, seman-
tic and grammatical apparatus (in which the philosophical tradition has
naively taken up its abode) to move in a direction contrary to its constant
tendency: namely, the assignment of proper nouns, the reduction to iden-
tity and the passage to the universal. In other words, the specific nature
of Nietzsche’s discourse might well be defined in the first instance as an
attempt to encourage disbelief in the laws of logic, and the rules of gram-
mar (the final refuge of a defunct theology…20
Haar’s reading of Nietzsche—like that of other prominent commenta-

tors discussed above—is notably subjectivist in its assumption of a sort of
animistic power of belief or other subjective trait. In Adorno’s language,
it posits a primacy of the subject, which can somehow override history. As
discussed, this subjective primacy is itself symptomatic of objective rela-
tionality. First, the attachment to logic and grammar is not a matter of
belief or disbelief emanating from within a subject. This ability to attach
or detach from our pros and cons—as Nietzsche says—is itself expres-
sive of a need conditioned by social history. Second, language does not
gregarize, but is rather the symptom of that same history. It expresses a
need for a type of sociality that is reproduced, but does not activate, or
animate, that sociality as some sort of magical cause. Moreover, to say
that language gregarizes implies a sort of non-linguistic, non-conceptual
form of reflection, transgression, or existence that would liberate us.
But, Nietzsche is also conceptualizing convalescence and genealogy, not
RELATIONALITY, ASCETIC IDEAL, AND STATUS QUO 127
to valorize a realm of pure dynamism or affirmation, but rather to bring

that conceptualization—and its accompanying elsewhere and otherwise,
i.e., its imbrication with the ascetic ideal—to its limit within suffered
social scenes. Nietzschean reflection points to the primacy of such scenes,
rather than to some sort of abstractly conceived difference or transgres-
sion.
In short, Haar offers an idealization of the problem, as if “explod-
ing” fetishized concepts would disrupt “belief” in those concepts, and
hence disrupt herd life in hopes that this would lead to a new “truth”
and “ethics” in the future with the Overman. The portrayal of the non-
identical as “difference,” “be-ing,” “multiplicity of forces,” etc. is a reifi-
cation. As such it thwarts the dialectic between the non-identical object
and identifying reflection; the reification of the objective side implies the
simultaneous reification of the subjective side. These reifications express
an allergy to the suffered character of the non-identical and the ways in
which that character conditions reflection. In this way, they reproduce
the status quo.
Relationality, Ascetic Ideal, and Status Quo

The third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality traces the way in which
the ascetic ideal is implicit in two parallel problems. On the one hand,
the analyses of the ideal and the ascetic priest—the embodiment of that
ideal within its social context—imply a critique of philosophy; on the
other hand, in the sense that philosophy is a part of culture, they imply
a critique of culture. On the one hand, Nietzsche sketches out a type
reflection that works-through its constitutive ties to the ascetic ideal and
the suffered sociality of which that ideal is symptomatic; on the other
hand, he suggests a theory of mass society formed by the proliferation
of this ideal and implicitly a theory of a society capable of working itself
toward a better future.
Nietzsche’s focus on the proliferation of the ascetic ideal, its many
forms and meanings, its ability to adapt itself, and find a home in diverse
situations, expresses the floating character of the symptomatic mark left
by abject history of slave morality and civilization. He writes: “That the
ascetic ideal has meant so much to man reveals a basic fact of human
will, its horror vacui; it needs an aim—, and it prefers to will nothingness
rather than not will” (Nietzsche 1997, 68). One might interpret asceti-
cism here—the willing of nothingness—as the assertion of a subjectivity
endowed with a magical power that it asserts from a suffered need to

override unbearable social history. For Nietzsche, human personality is
constituted by the mark of a need to be “elsewhere” and “otherwise”;
rather than not will, like a pre-civilized, “natural” being, humans auto-
matically, unconsciously project values that position themselves outside
of suffered history. This is the legacy of the genealogies traced in the first
two essays of the Genealogy, as discussed in Chap. 3; the abject humilia-
tion of being forced into the social straightjacket, the trauma of the loss
of nomadic prehistory, forced our ancestors into a psychosomatic “else-
where” and “otherwise.” One flourishes in such conditions, or often
simply survives, only if one has lost one’s self, if one has become “any
Nobody.”21 The obliterated self is then the standard of value, of being a
good person, of having social capital, of being worthy of love—but only
on condition that one continues to will nothingness in socially mandated
ways.
The possibility of not willing is located in the rupture of the convales-
cent’s willing by suffered materiality—in exhaustion, sickness, and inabil-
ity to move. Recovery depends on the ability to allow one’s embodied
materiality to express itself without a bad conscience. That moment of
the rupture of subjectivity is not a permanent Nirvana, transgression of
domination, or a resolute stoic communion with nature, but rather a
moment of the ordeal of convalescence which then produces a renewed
reflection able to bear its suffered conditions of possibility.
The ascetic ideal can take a fixated form—which is its association with
slave morality and bad conscience—or a more transitional form. It might
be said that convalescent reflection has not relinquished asceticism com-
pletely, but rather incorporated it as a moment within a broader work-
ing-through. As mentioned in Chap. 2, Nietzsche’s reference to the
Russian soldier’s exhaustion—i.e., being forced not to will—symbolizes
will reaching its limit in the rupture of its own excessive objectivity. It
shows us the possibility of a world without obligatory forms of ressenti-
ment and removes us from the heat of the status quo, forcing us to bear
our objectivity, which exceeds, eludes, and conditions our concepts. It
confounds and situates the socialized will and asserts a primacy over that
will which implies a different valuation of the future—one structured
to shelter the convalescent coming interminably to herself. In contrast,
the hyperanimated will retreats and imagines itself as in control, dissoci-
ated from objects, or as able to be properly receptive to objects. It then
preserves its power through a variety of symptomatic ways from maso-

chism to assumptions of morality and grammar.
Nietzsche does not offer an alternative to the ascetic ideal, as if it
could be replaced with a Dionysian philosophy of the body, a philosophy
of total immanence which lives within the spatializing and temporalizing
effects of the moment, or a philosophy of difference which interminably
subverts the faith in the identity supporting such an ideal. If the ascetic
ideal is constitutive of human subjectivity, the “solution” offered by
Nietzsche is something more akin to a negative dialectic, which recog-
nizes both the necessity of the ascetic moment and the working-through
of the defensiveness upon which that asceticism is founded, and thereby
coming to bear the messy, entanglements of social history. This would
be to avow the contradiction that recognizes, on the one hand, that we
cannot bear social history and, on the other hand, that any amelioration
of social existence depends on our being able to bear and negotiate those
histories—despite the guilt, entanglements, inconvenience, and suffering
that negotiation entails.
He writes:
We know what the three great catchwords of the ascetic ideal are: pov-
erty, humility, chastity: let us now look at the life of all great, productive,
inventive spirits close up, for once, –all three will be found in them, to a
certain degree, every time. Of course, it goes without saying that they will
definitely not be ‘virtues’—this type of person cannot be bothered with vir-
tues!—but as the most proper and natural prerequisites for their best exist-
ence and finest productivity… (Nietzsche 1997, 78)
An opposition is proposed between “moral virtue”—which, according

to Nietzsche, would represent a fixation of the ascetic ideal, as defense
against the negative—and the integration of the ascetic ideal in what
might be called a “negative dialectic,” in which the ideal is a moment
within a larger work of contending with concretely situated social con-
texts to create a better future.22 On this reading, the ascetic ideal is con-
stitutive of human being; it suggests that the impulse to transcend the
immediate, to promise, to imagine, and desire to be elsewhere and oth-
erwise is the basis of subjectivity. Nietzsche is not suggesting that the
ideal can be eradicated, permanently overcome for a non-ascetic alter-
native affirmation or transgression. Rather, asceticism and sensuality
are necessarily intertwined, and as has been suggested, the fundamental
problem is the form of this entanglement and the form of the ascetic
ideal—fixated or transitional.23
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: “What is the seal of having
become free?—No longer to be ashamed before oneself.”24 This must
be read through Nietzsche’s socio-historical perspective; shame is not a
characteristic or feeling of an “individual,” but rather a social formation.
Nietzsche’s genealogies are the working-through of shame, as the con-
dition of possibility of singularity. Insofar as I am ashamed of myself, I
am kept in thrall by the status quo through affective bonds with others.
Convalescence is the working-through of these bonds, which puts the
need for those bonds into question, and integrates more of the suffered
socio-historical scene into that need, or more of the need into the scene.
To no longer be ashamed of oneself implies that one’s values would
be understood in their socio-cultural context, not merely in their natural
context. It would imply the overcoming of the socially reproduced fixa-
tion of values and that valuing is accompanied by a second moment of
failure implied by suffering. On this reading, one would not see shame-
lessness as an achievable, celebratory, transgressive final state, but rather
as a moment. Liberation would thereby be a moment that takes place
in a larger struggle with unfreedom; it occurs in the process of bearing
the fact that my subjectivity is symptomatic and hence out of my con-
trol, in other words, not in a moment of immediacy or empowerment
of the self, but within mediation. One becomes more whole when one
integrates one’s radical vulnerability and unfreedom with one’s values—
this is not liberation from all ressentiment, but only momentary freedom
from a particular instantiation of ressentiment. It would be wrong to sug-
gest that for Nietzsche “animality,” “embodiment” and “difference”
are things we can simply celebrate, as if these are simply facts that I can
or cannot affirm or deny. They are rather signs for excessive objectiv-
ity, and any process of coming to appreciate them, of integrating them
into ourselves, must be conceived as a more or less unbearable ordeal
of living from moment to moment. On this reading, if Nietzsche some-
times seems to advocate some sort of absolute transgression, it is only in
fragments or moments that only have meaning in connection with other
fragments or moments.
This genealogy of the philosopher is in effect Nietzsche’s version of
reflection’s accounting of itself. As discussed above, this is similar to
Marx’s claim that, like philosophy, materialist criticism is also only pos-
sible because of the division of labor. Philosophical idealism posits an
origin of truth that is unmediated by the negative, unable to bear its own
history and conditions of possibility, and therefore allies itself with forces
that enable it to preserve itself and enable it to accept itself and feel as if
it is worthy of respect. In other words, it allies itself with the status quo
as a mode of defense in the form of the ascetic priest. Genealogical think-
ing—which is also only possible through the same separation of labor
and ascetic ideal—is historically associated with the priest and its symbol-
ically acceptable guise. To survive, philosophers needed to feel as if they
were worthy of fear and respect and needed to make others fear them; so
they created an ascetic meaning, with an unprecedented sublimity of cru-
elty toward themselves. Nietzsche writes:
…the philosophic spirit always had to disguise and cocoon itself among
previously established types of contemplative man, as a priest, magician,
soothsayer, religious man in general, in order for its existence to be possi-
ble at all: the ascetic ideal served the philosopher for a long time as out-
ward appearance…he had to play that part…had to believe in it in order
to be able to play it…The particularly withdrawn attitude of the philoso-
phers, denying the world, hating life, doubting the senses, desensualized…
is primarily the result of the desperate conditions under which philosophy
evolved and exists at all…the ascetic priest has until the most recent times
displayed the vile and dismal form of a caterpillar, which was the only one
philosophers were allowed to adopt and creep around in…Have things
really changed? Has the brightly coloured, dangerous winged-insect…
thrown off the monk’s habit and emerged into the light, thanks to a sun-
nier, warmer and more enlightened world? (Nietzsche 1997, 84)
Reflection’s genealogical accounting of itself does not merely situ-

ate reflection within a naturalism, Will to Power, or “instincts turned
inward,” but rather within suffered, socio-historical contexts. It does not
merely “contextualize” the activity of the philosopher within a web of
historical “events.” Rather, as has been discussed in regard to the first
two essays of the Genealogy, the suffered character of the history implies
that the origin of the subject and hence of the philosopher lies within a
more or less traumatic vulnerability within sociality.
For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is ultimately the expres-
sion of this fixated ascetic ideal which cannot bear its suffered, social
conditions of possibility. When the ascetic ideal is exaggerated into a
fixated defense mechanism, as an expression of ressentiment, “satisfac-
tion is looked for and found in failure, decay, pain, misfortune, ugliness,
voluntary deprivation, destruction of selfhood, self-flagellation and self-

sacrifice … a conflict … which relishes itself in this affliction and becomes
more self-assured and triumphant to the same degree as its own condi-
tion, the physiological capacity to live, decreases” (Nietzsche 1997, 86).
Thus, Schopenhauer represents an extreme, albeit disguised, form of the
bad conscience in which hyperbolic asceticism acts as a defense mecha-
nism against embodied social history, which is reduced to “the Will.” In
contrast, convalescence would be a process within which asceticism—as
the root of all subjectivity, which strives to transcend the object—serves
the negotiation of suffered, sociality. In that sense, it guides movement,
isolation, diet, rest, activity, discipline, or measured exposure to pain in
order to negotiate that excessive, more or less traumatic, character of
experience.
On our reading, the ascetic ideal, which guides philosophical concern
with beauty, is the expression of a defense against suffered sociality and
not merely a “hatred of the body.” Nietzsche writes:
Schopenhauer…still could not break free of the spell of Kant’s definition:

why not? The situation is very odd: he interpreted the phrase ‘without
interest’ in the most personal way possible, from an experience which, in
his case, must have been one of the most frequently recurring…aesthetic
contemplation…counteracts sexual ‘interestedness’, rather like lupulin and
camphor…We might even be tempted to ask whether the basic concep-
tion of ‘will and representation’, the thought that redemption from the
‘will’ could only take place through ‘representation’, might not originate
in a generalization of that sexual experience…And, to come back to our
first question, ‘what does it mean if a philosopher pays homage to ascetic
ideals?’ we get our first hint: he wants to free himself from torture…
(Nietzsche 1997, 74–75)
Bodily desire is embedded in a social history that is sufficiently abject

as to generate a defense against shared pleasure. This is implicit in
Schopenhauer’s torture. To extend the concepts of debt and credit dis-
cussed in Chap. 3, social exchange implies an economy of suffering and
pleasure which entangles us within attachments to others—attachments
that leave us with debts to others who have contributed to our pleasure
and debts to those we have caused to suffer. The ascetic ideal is the mark
of the inability to bear this entanglement and therefore the positing of
an ideal of dissociation, or of the consoling redemption from intolerable
commitments within a revelation of truth, beauty, or transcendent moral
goodness. That said, Schopenhauer’s idealized escape from negotiating

will and its suffered social objectivity, is not a denial of existence, but the
affirmation of a particular type of existence, not a denial of embodied
relationality, but the reproduction of a contradictory form of embodied,
relational existence. Nietzsche writes: “… on seeing an ascetic ideal, the
philosopher smiles because he sees an optimum condition of the highest
and boldest intellectuality, –he does not deny ‘existence’ by doing so, but
rather affirms his existence and only his existence … ” (Nietzsche 1997,
77).
Nietzsche uses Stendhal as a counterexample: “Stendhal, no less a
sensualist than Schopenhauer but with a more happily adjusted person-
ality, emphasizes another effect of beauty: ‘beauty promises happiness’,
to him, the fact of the matter is precisely the excitement of the will (‘of
interest’) through beauty” (Nietzsche 1997, 75). Stendhal’s view implies
our embeddedness within social histories, and hence, the freeing of inter-
est from fixation leads us back to a promise of a better future within
concrete social attachments. Beauty is not the mark of dissociation from
objects, but rather the promise of the renewal of ineluctable association;
in other words, it expresses the break from the ascetic ideal, the break
from that socially reproduced, obligatory defense against social history.
Again, the ascetic ideal and priest are only apparently against life; “the
ascetic ideal is a trick for the preservation of life … this ascetic priest, this
apparent enemy of life, this negating one, –he actually belongs to the
really great conserving and yes-creating forces of life” (Nietzsche 1997,
88). This claim that the ascetic priest and ressentiment are “yes-creat-
ing” forces might be understood through the concept of the defense
mechanism, which preserves life in a certain way, albeit pathologically.
Ressentiment enables humans to survive as herds and in so doing cre-
ates a massive laboratory for the positing of “elsewhere” and “other-
wise.” Thus, Nietzsche says that the ascetic priest’s “future mercilessly
digs into the flesh of every present like a spur … His ‘no’ that he says to
life brings a wealth of more tender ‘yeses’ to light as though by magic;
and even when he wounds himself … it is the wound itself that forces
him to live” (Nietzsche 1997, 90). This points toward the reversal of the
ascetic position as suggested previously: the ascetic priest as necessary
garb, the reified form (as divine, for example) as a defense mechanism
to enable the survival of philosophy. If we understand it as historically
conditioned, and as demanding a socio-historical working-through, it is
not just a mistaken belief or a hatred toward life that can be countered
by some sort of subjective action, posture, or idea. Rather, Nietzsche

is painting the rich, suffered socio-historical context of reflection, from
which there is no magical, animistic escape by a “free” willing, spontane-
ous subject which can separate itself from “the will”, from psychosomatic
history, and direct itself toward a valorized outcome. The sickness affects
us all. That said, the “healthy,” those who embody a different possibility
of this history, despite being conditioned by that history, “are the guar-
antors of the future” … and need to be sheltered from the sick, to bet-
ter defend themselves from “nausea at man” and “deep compassion for
man” (Nietzsche 1997, 91).
Let’s recall that Nietzsche starts the essay with the statement: “What
do ascetic ideals mean? … with physiological causalities and the disgrun-
tled (with the majority of mortals), an attempt to see themselves as ‘too
good’ for this world, a saintly form of debauchery, their chief weapon
in the battle against long drawn-out pain and boredom … ” (Nietzsche
1997, 68). The figure of the ascetic priest is the social manifestation of
the ascetic ideal. As such, it represents not simply actual “priests,” or the
Judeo-Christian tradition, but mass culture itself, in so far as the foun-
dation for modernity was laid by the history of the ascetic ideal. The
connections between Nietzsche’s analysis of the ascetic priest and the
“Culture Industry” are undeniable.25
For our prehistoric ancestors, the cause of suffering was directed
toward the scapegoat;
…every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress [Leid];

more exactly, for a culprit…for a living being upon whom he can release
his emotions, actually or in effigy, on some pretext or other: because
the release of emotions is the greatest attempt at relief, or should I say,
at anaesthetizing on the part of the sufferer, his involuntarily longed for
narcotic against pain of any kind…we find here the actually physiologi-
cal causation of ressentiment, revenge and their ilk, in a yearning, then, to
anaesthetize pain through emotion…to anaesthetize a tormenting, secret
pain that is becoming unbearable with a more violent emotion of any sort,
and at least rid the consciousness of it for the moment… (Nietzsche 1997,
93)
In response, the ascetic priest—or ascetic culture—appropriates this need

for anesthesia in new creative ways. For Nietzsche, this does express an
attempt at healing by redirecting ressentiment toward the self, which is at
least an attempt at promoting self-discipline, self-surveillance, and self-

overcoming. In ways that parallel the ascendancy of slave morality and
the origins of conscience, this internalization of ressentiment serves a
positive function of interrupting unreflective, spontaneous, unpredictable
scapegoating as a response to suffering and initiates primitive forms of
reflection. It also enables a certain social stability where love is coupled
with the bad conscience. Nonetheless, it posits a new sort of scapegoat in
the healthy, strong, and immoral—i.e., those who convalesce and deviate
from the fetishization of ressentiment—and in so doing enables a much
more effective structure of social control. The shared anesthesia allows
the mass to coalesce into a shared victimhood, and thereby posit a cause
in the other or outside, on whom they can direct their aggression.
The priest is the cultural figure skilled at reproducing and appropriat-
ing the slaves’ loss of self. Nietzsche writes:
It is only suffering itself, the discomfort of the sufferer, that he combats,

not its cause, not the actual state of being ill…we have every right to
call Christianity in particular a large treasure-trove of the most ingenious
means of consolation, so much to refresh, soothe and narcotize is piled up
inside it…it has been so especially subtle, so refined…in guessing which
emotions to stimulate in order to conquer the deep depression, the leaden
fatigue and the black melancholy of the physiologically obstructed, at least
temporarily… (Nietzsche 1997, 95–96)
The ascetic priest uses a variety of methods to anaesthetize, i.e., to affirm

the position of slave morality, bad conscience, and a fixated ascetic ideal.
First, he or she brings about a “loss of self,” by reducing “the aware-
ness of life to the lowest point … no more wanting, no more wishing
… no loving, no hating … the result in physiological and moral terms:
‘loss of self’, ‘sanctification’, in physiological terms: hypnotization … ”
(Nietzsche 1997, 97). Second, the masses are mobilized into mechani-
cal, busy work; “… consequently little room is left for suffering: because
this chamber of human consciousness is small! … absolute regular-
ity, punctual, mindless obedience, ones’ way of life fixed once and for
all, time-filling, a certain encouragement, indeed discipline … to forget
oneself … ” (Nietzsche 1997, 99). Third, abject suffering is legitimized
through ideology as being beneficial. Fourth, the value of giving others
pleasure is claimed to be supreme, rather than the personal experience
of it, in a way that arouses a petty sense of communal superiority over
“selfish,” hedonistic others. This in turn provides a sort of compensation

for the loss of self and creates group bonds that offer cooperation and
libidinal rewards.
One might say that the main action of the ascetic priest—in a way
quite similar to Adorno’s description of contemporary ideology—is the
subjectivization of suffered history. In the first essay, the priest’s alliance
with the mass of slaves culminated in the invention of a “free will,” a
magical power from which all Good and Evil arise. In the second essay,
the inversion of the instincts left the symptom of a bad conscience, an
internalized scar of a socio-historical process. Likewise, in the third essay,
the ascetic priest appropriates the ascetic ideal in a variety of ways to pro-
vide consolation for suffering; the sufferer should look for reasons of his
or her suffering “in guilt, in a piece of the past … as a condition of pun-
ishment … ” (Nietzsche 1997, 104). As has been discussed, there are at
least two salient dimensions of the history of this subjectivization: on the
one hand, the more or less traumatic loss created by transition to mass
society, and on the other hand, the “interpretation” of socio-historical
existence as traumatic—socially mandated meaning that structures ritu-
als, social organization and provides the basis for social capital. The fixa-
tion implicit in this ascetic priest’s subjectivization of history is a form
of culture; “the will to misunderstand suffering made into the content
of life …” (Nietzsche 1997, 105). This culture reproduces the inability
to negotiate the social histories of suffering, in a symptomatic primacy
of subjectivity, which posits animistic causation within the psyche and
fantasies of separation from the inseparable. These consolations do not
ameliorate the suffering, but exacerbate the neurotic, defensive response
to that suffering. The effects of the priest’s treatments can be seen in
“… a shattered nervous system … applied on the largest and smallest
scale, with individuals and masses … mass delirium … interrupted now
by voluptuousness, now by manic-destructive idiosyncracies: and the
same alteration of emotions, with the same intervals and reversals … ”
(Nietzsche 1997, 106).
The ascetic ideal gave the human animal a meaning, symptomatic
of more or less traumatic, meaningless suffering. The meaning sanc-
tified a subjective fantasy of separation from its objectivity. Although
this free will sanctified a will to nothingness, that nothingness enables
symbolic coalescing of groups, provides socially shared channels for
love and aggression, for lost instincts to express themselves, and in so
doing, enables mass society, mobilized by the mobilization of powerful
feelings. The phrase, “man still prefers to will nothingness, than not will
… ” might simply refer to the magic of subjective omnipotence seem-
ingly dissociated from its objectivity. Nietzsche is not suggesting we dis-
solve ourselves into a meaningless, will-less sea of cause and effect, into a
cold obliteration of matter as if we are merely objects. Rather, in a man-
ner similar to Adorno, he wants to save the magic, integrating it with
our objectivity. Convalescence would be the work of this integration of
subjectivity into suffered social history. This would be a socio-historically,
psycho-somatically conditioned suffering of reflection on the suffered,
social histories of reflection and on the psychosomatic unconscious con-
stitution of our subjectivities. This will to nothingness must be worked
out of—a symptom reproduced by dominant culture from which we
must convalesce.
One might reread the quote mentioned in the Introduction, through
the lens of this analysis of the ascetic ideal:
to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small

discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future ‘objectivity’—the
latter understood not as ‘contemplation without interest’ (which is, as
such, a non-concept and an absurdity), but as having in our power the abil-
ity to engage and disengage our ‘pros’ and ‘cons’: we can use the differ-
ence in perspectives and affective interpretations for knowledge…let us be
wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-tale which has set up a ‘pure,
will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’, let us be wary of the
tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spiritu-
ality’, ‘knowledge as such’…there is only a perspectival seeing, only a per-
spectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a
thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the
more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. But to
eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without excep-
tion, assuming we could: well? Would that not mean to castrate the intel-
lect? (Nietzsche 1997, 87)
On the one hand, Nietzsche valorizes a certain flexibility through which

one is able to engage and disengage ones ‘pros’ and ‘cons’, i.e., good
and bad as opposed to rigidified Good and Evil. This implies a suffered,
concrete mobility through which we accumulate moments, perspectives,
affects which conditions our concepts, and the “objectivity” of those
concepts. On the other hand, Nietzsche identifies the fixated inflexibility
and lack of mobility in the figure of the fairy tale of a “pure, will-less,
painless, timeless, subject of knowledge.” The latter, however, is the

expression of a magical fantasy, which as we have seen is reproduced by
the abject histories discussed in the first two essays. The concept embod-
ies the fantasy of a suffering subject defending against flexibility and
mobility, which have been either concretely experienced as unbearable,
or symbolically coded as such (e.g., as “Evil”) within a fetishized cultural
narrative. One might say then that these two options of mobility and fix-
ation are also paradigmatic forms of the ascetic ideal, which are in con-
tention. Moreover, the tentacles of the fixated form of the ideal extend
into and pervade seemingly immune forms of language. Nietzsche’s
comments on the pure subject which imply a critique of Kant can be
read with Adorno’s critique of the transcendental subject in Kant and
Husserl. Also, Chapter 5 will explore similarities between this paradig-
matic opposition between fixation and mobility, at the heart of subjectiv-
ity, and certain features of the object relations psychoanalysis of Melanie
Klein and D.W. Winnicott.
Notes
1. A broader historical analysis of the relationship between Adorno and
Nietzsche can be found in Bauer, Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives:
Critiques of Ideology, Readings of Wagner.
2. See, for example, Adorno’s texts, “The Meaning of Working-Through
the Past”, “Freudian Theory and Fascist Propaganda”, or Dialectic of
Enlightenment.
3. Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political, 110.
4. For Adorno, the Heideggerian “mythology of language” is “an apothe-
osis of the objective Spirit, which from the very beginning ostracized the
reflection on the material process” (Adorno 1966, 180–181).
5. One might argue that Heidegger’s notion of unconcealment, for example,
contains a measure of respect for objectivity in that it reflects the way in
which objectivity shapes presence; objects come and go, hide, and appear
in their partiality, emerge and fade, they are not given as static wholes.
Nonetheless, the revelation of unconcealment does not indicate a coher-
ent reflection on the way in which objectivity—and its negativity—con-
ditions the possibility of that revelation. Unconcealment, as a subjective
manifestation of objective conditions, leaves the status quo undisturbed
in the valorization of revelation.
6. A similar critique of Heidegger can be made through psychoanalysis. See
Jackson, Philosophy and Working-through the Past, 129–150.
NOTES 139
7. Jon Mills articulates a typical subjectivistic understanding of the negative

in his claim that the goal of psychoanalysis is to realize that the negative is
necessary for growth. Mills writes that “among so much death and decay,
which saturates out daily world preoccupations, here we may enjoy some
optimism that all this suffering is a necessary and meaningful dimension
of the dialectic, which is part and parcel of the positive significance of
the negative that brings about a better world. Without conflict there can
be neither growth nor betterment.” See Mills, Origins: On the Genesis of
Psychic Reality, 19. From Adorno’s perspective, this is an idealization—
the view of negativity from the perspective of the concept. It reifies the
lived inevitable eruption of the negative, which constitutes continual
exposure to the more or less traumatic. Having a concept of the neces-
sity of negativity pretends to be a substitute for suffered negativity, as if it
could be conceptualized. Rather, it indicates an exposure that undergirds,
ruptures, and gives rise to conceptualization.
8. A similar critique of Levinas could be made from this Adornian position.
See Jackson, “Persecution and Social Histories: Towards an Adornian
Critique of Levinas”.
9. In regard to the Marxian assertion of the primacy of praxis, for example,
Adorno writes: “The demand for the unity of theory and praxis has irre-
sistibly debased the former to a mere underling … the former was van-
quished and the latter became non-conceptual, a piece of the politics
which it was supposed to lead beyond; delivered over to power. The liq-
uidation of theory by dogmatization and the ban on thinking contributed
to bad praxis; that theory should win back its independence is the inter-
est of praxis itself … Whoever scolds theory as anachronistic, obeys the
topos of dismissing as outmoded what was thwarted and remains painful.
Therein precisely the course of the world is reconfirmed, which it is the
very idea of theory not to obey … ” (Adorno 1966, 147). The primacy
of praxis posits an animistic spontaneity within the subject that would
purportedly be able to emerge from a purity unaffected by suffered social
histories, as if the motivation driving the praxis was not itself fundamen-
tally imbricated within history, more or less fixated within a suffered posi-
tion. The denial of theory would emerge from the inability to bear the
painful loss and humiliation implicit in history, which now finds solace in
magical action. In short, the taboo against theory is theoretical. This link-
ing of the desire to transgress theory with a dismissal of what is “painful”
implies the intolerable character of social life. Rejecting theory in favor
of “praxis”—which is itself a theoretical act—is a way of disavowing what
cannot be borne.
10. See Marx, Capital, 871–895.
11. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie,” 148.
12. In regard to the transcendental subject, Adorno writes: “The more auto-
cratically the I raises itself above the existent, the more it imperceptibly
turns into an object and ironically countermands its constitutive role …
Beyond the magic circle of identity philosophy, the transcendental subject
can be deciphered as the society which is unconscious of itself” (Adorno
1966, 178).
13. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 89–90.
14. Ibid., 10.
15. Ibid., 97.
16. Ibid., 99.
17. Ibid., 99–100.
18. Adorno writes: “The circle of identification, which ultimately always iden-
tifies only itself, was drawn by the thinking that tolerates nothing outside;
its imprisonment is its own handiwork. Such totalitarian and for that rea-
son particular rationality was historically dictated by what was threatening
in nature … Identifying thought, the making of everything different into
the same, perpetuates the bondage of nature [Naturverfallenheit] in fear
… unreflective reason is deluded to the point of madness in view of each
and every one [anything] which eludes its domination” (Adorno 1966,
174).
19. Haar, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” 7.
20. Ibid., 6.
21. This is discussed in Chap. 2. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
and Ecce Homo, 241.
22. Nietzsche suggests that asceticism would guide the philosopher’s salu-
tary avoidance of “noise, admiration, news, influence,” the seeking of
“a small position, daily routine,” tolerance of “a certain dependency and
darkening in the same way that he can stand the dark … not, as I have
to say again and again, out of virtue, out of a creditable will to modera-
tion and simplicity, but because their supreme master so demands, cleverly
and inexorably: preoccupied with just one thing, collecting and saving
up everything—time, strength, love, interest—with that end in view …
with regard to the chastity of philosophers, this type of spirit obviously
has different progeny than children … it is their dominating instinct, at
least during periods when they are pregnant with something great ...”
(Nietzsche 1997, 78–80). Again, this is not a moral antithesis of virtue
vs. vice, but the transfiguration of sensuality in the context of social rela-
tionships, and the harnessing of it in the creation of beauty for a better
social future.
23. Nietzsche writes: “… there is not, necessarily, an antithesis between chas-
tity and sensuality; every good marriage, every real affair of the heart
transcends this antithesis … This ought to be true for all healthy cheerful
NOTES 141
mortals who are far from seeing their precarious balancing act between
‘animal and angel’ as necessarily one of the arguments against life,–the
best and the brightest … actually found in it one more of life’s charms.
Such ‘contradictions’ are what makes life so enticing … On the other
hand, it is only too clear that if pigs who have fallen on hard times are
made to praise chastity … they will only see in it and praise the oppo-
site of themselves, the opposite of pigs who have fallen on hard times—
and oh! what a tragic grunting and excitement there will be!” (Nietzsche
1997, 69).
25. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments, 94–136.
CHAPTER 5
Working-Through Perspectives in Nietzsche

and Object Relations Psychoanalysis
The Introduction included a discussion of Nietzsche’s comment

from the third essay of the Genealogy that epistemological objectiv-
ity should be understood as arising from a movement through perspec-
tives, through an ability to engage and disengage our pros and cons.
For Nietzsche, this ability is forged within suffered social scenes that are
more or less facilitative of transitional experiences of norms. Dominant
culture reproduces itself by thwarting this ability in a variety of ways
expressive of the fetishization of fixated positions and norms. As dis-
cussed, Nietzsche seems to imply the possibility of a convalescent culture
within which this ability would be sheltered and facilitated.
The theories of Klein and Winnicott focus on the genesis of the sub-
ject out of its relational context, suggesting interesting parallels between
what are seen as developmental theories and the genealogical. As with
Nietzsche, the theories of Klein and Winnicott cannot be reduced to
causal accounts of subjectivity, since for each thinker there is a precari-
ous exposure that constitutes pre-subjectivity and the possibility of devel-
opment hinges on a suffered, relational negotiation of that exposure.
For Klein and Winnicott, moral and epistemological subjectivity are the
symptoms of suffered, relational histories; this inverts the metaphysical
view that assumes forms of subjectivity endowed with animistic power—
free will, the capacity for correct thinking, questioning, openness, etc.—
which would now be seen as symptoms of an inability to bear suffered
sociality. In other words, as with Nietzsche, metaphysics is the expression
of suffered sociality with a bad conscience.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6_5
144 5 WORKING-THROUGH PERSPECTIVES IN NIETZSCHE …
Convalescence might be understood as the suffered negotiation of

the loss of partiality. In injury or incapacitation, the health and mobility
taken for granted in one’s previous mode of suffered existence is rup-
tured. The partiality of that existence is therefore contextualized within
a suffered whole, that must be borne. One might find the same theme,
however, running more broadly through Nietzsche’s work—in concepts
of the so-called eternal recurrence and his critique of “Good and Evil,”
for example. Partiality in this sense might be read through Klein’s notion
of “partial objects,” i.e., objects as given to our embodied, libidinal per-
spectival situatedness. The casting of the possibility of epistemological
objectivity in terms of the ability to engage and disengage our pros and
cons would imply an ability to bear the ordeal of losing entrenched par-
tial positions or moments which become fixated.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism is often taken to be the liberating fate of
a subject whose faith in a supposedly pernicious presence, identity, or
transcendence has been transgressed. As a center of consciousness, such
a perspectival subject, so the story goes, would be free of the thrall of
dominant, socially obligatory essentialisms and would therefore be capa-
ble of grasping the untruth of truth or difference. Within such liber-
ated awareness, persons would thereby be free of the colonizing gaze
or interpellation which imposes identity where there is only difference.
In contrast to this view, following from the reading of Nietzsche devel-
oped above, one might say that there is a primacy of the suffered, social
situatedness of the subject, which always finds only partial objects at any
given moment. Such partial objects, given as perspectives, are not in
themselves liberating, because their imbrication with suffering and con-
crete social histories implies a measure of fixation. This fixation—which
is more or less rigid, more or less entrenched—implies that domination is
imbricated within social scenes, rather than being located in some sort of
faith in presence or transcendence, or other subjective position. In other
words, there is a socially conditioned need that drives our inability to
bear the loss of certain perspectives, i.e., to submit to a motility of per-
spectives to engage or disengage our partial positions. The latter would
entail a suffered process—a convalescence—of coming to bear that our
most cherished objects—objects as our desire would have them—are
partial moments. In other words, liberation would at a basic level require
the ability to bear and negotiate the negativity which infuses objectivity,
primarily in the loss of our cherished perspectives.
5 WORKING-THROUGH PERSPECTIVES IN NIETZSCHE … 145
Nietzsche’s critique of dualisms—paradigmatically the opposition

between Good and Evil, his description of Eternal Recurrence and Will to
Power, and other moments—can be read through this lens. Bifurcation
of experience and objects is driven by need and presents a primitive way
of responding to others and objects. This can be understood as a vari-
ation of the psychoanalytic notion of splitting, primarily in certain fea-
tures of Melanie Klein’s conception of the mother as being alternately
the “good object” and the “bad object.” A key developmental task in
Kleinian psychoanalysis is the integration of these two positions toward
the same object into a more complicated position. For Klein and
Winnicott, negotiating the imperfections of integration is salutary for
the developing child; for Nietzsche, it forms the path to socio-histori-
cal emancipation. This would not be a transition to contradiction-free
unity—as some sort of positive dialectical integration of materiality into
our ideas and values—but rather as an integration of the non-integrable,
in which the excess of the object, its negativity, is brought together with
its concept. From this perspective, the ability to negotiate such negativ-
ity would be a condition of possibility of creating a salutary, convalescent
future.
One might see object relations psychoanalysis as implying a para-
digmatic account of the primacy of sociality.1 Despite the emphasis on
infancy, there is a commonality with Nietzsche in the sense that both
see subjectivity as a symptom of embodied, suffered pre-subjective rela-
tionality. In both cases, this imbrication implies social mediation of
the suffered process through which subjectivity arises—for object rela-
tions theory, that mediation is conceived primarily in terms of caregiv-
ing and the environment. As seen above, for Nietzsche, that mediation
is conceived through a series of concepts of cultural dimensions of slaves’
morality, ressentiment, and the ascetic ideal. Similarly, these theorists’
conceptions of good caregiving in facilitating environments find a certain
parallel in a Nietzschean conception of convalescent culture.
To be clear, this is not simply a proposal that either Nietzsche or
object relations theory is reducible to the other, but rather that they can
be read as extending each other in their analyses of the suffered relational
origins of subjectivity. As in the reading of Nietzsche developed above,
object relations theory does not provide one final account, or definitive
causal explanation of the formation of subjectivity, but rather gives an
approach to understand the imbrication of relationality and suffering
from which subjectivity emerges. In this sense, it might be said to also
contribute to genealogies of subjectivity and thereby provide a context

from which to bring similar aspects of Nietzsche’s fragmentary writing
into focus. Neither offers a causal account of the recalcitrance of partial
positions, but rather both see those positions as expressions of constella-
tions of the social, spatial, temporal dimensions of suffered scenes.
As discussed in the Introduction, Nietzsche often presents language
as a system of socially obligatory simplifications, facilitative of communal
partiality. The genealogy of the subject itself traces itself back to a sort of
mass reproduction of partiality that is fortified against transgressing its
partiality through social consequences, guilt, pride, and varied consola-
tions. Convalescent thinking would be a working-through of partiality,
requiring that one bear one’s often unbearable objectivity, exposed to
death, pain, and loss. The theories of Klein and Winnicott focus on the
infant’s encounter with this more or less bearable objectivity. It might
be said that Nietzsche extends this sociologically, by emphasizing shared
partiality in the form of shared, floating partiality as a socially facilitated
regressive schizoid position that can take on different content in different
contexts. For example, “Good” vs. “Evil” represents a transferable form
of fixated partiality which bars all dialectic, all “integration” as unbear-
able. This then points toward the more or less traumatic, overwhelm-
ing, rupturing nature of the object, which then suggests the imbrication
of suffering socially mediated materiality and the socially mediated sym-
bolic.
Signs of Convalescence: Recurrence and Integrating

Good and Evil
Section 341 of Gay Science, often seen as an early articulation of the
idea of the so-called eternal recurrence, can be read through this lens.
Nietzsche writes:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest lone-
liness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you
will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will
be nothing new in it, every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh
and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you,
all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moon-
light between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal
hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it,
SIGNS OF CONVALESCENCE: RECURRENCE AND INTEGRATING GOOD AND EVIL 147
speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth
and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a
tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god,
and never have I heard anything more divine.’ …2
On the one hand, this describes a sort of negative dialectics, in which any
given moment, or perspective, would avow its necessary loss and mediat-
edness and hence its necessary connection with other moments and per-
spectives. On the other hand, it describes the ability to accept the loss
and mediation of cherished moments and perspectives—their necessary
connections with unpleasant, overwhelming moments—as being largely
unbearable. Hence, the section is titled “The heaviest weight,” which on
this reading would refer to the unbearable entanglement of our pleas-
urable, joyous experiences with the negative, good with bad. Nietzsche
asks, “ … have you once experienced … ” in your “loneliest loneliness,”
the ability to bear such a thought?—implying the suffered ordeal of
overcoming recalcitrant partiality. The thought of eternal return is the
thought of eternal mediation, which is almost constitutively unbearable
for humans, given our genealogy. Nonetheless, the possibility of future
liberation is suggested in Nietzsche’s asking of this question: “how well
disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for
nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and
seal?”3 This implies a suffered social future in which we would be better
able to bear the partiality of our experiences, their inevitable loss, and
ineluctable mediation. One might say in such a future, we would be able
to bear ourselves and other objects as wholes, i.e., as objects infused with
a negativity that undergirds, conditions, and ruptures our partial perspec-
tives on ourselves and others.
The imbrication of this thought with the social, however, is often
missed, as if eternal recurrence were simply about time, and the indi-
vidual’s experience of time, such that some sort of revelation of repeti-
tion would transform an individual’s existence. However, it also poses
the essential contradiction between the subject’s socio-historically con-
ditioned normative categorization of experience and the suffered mate-
riality of that experience; the contradiction lies within the claim of
independence from that which conditions the claim. It thus represents
that same structure of reflection as that suggested by the concept of con-
valescence: perspectives and values as partialities of the same whole—
a whole that is suffered not known—in which partiality as a socially
reproduced simplification that posits itself as independent works-through

its dependence within a suffering that transcends, undergirds, and rup-
tures that partiality.
Nietzsche’s concern with overcoming the fixation of values in an
opposition between Good and Evil might also be read through this lens.
In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes:
How could anything originate out of its opposite?…Things of the high-

est value must have another, separate origin of their own, –they cannot be
derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this
mad chaos of confusion and desire. Look instead to the lap of being, the
everlasting, the hidden God, the ‘thing-in-itself’…The fundamental belief
of metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values…It could even be pos-
sible that whatever gives value to those good and honorable things has an
incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil
opposites; perhaps they are even essentially the same. Perhaps! –But who is
willing to take charge of such a dangerous Perhaps!4
The understatement implicit in this “perhaps” is similar to the under-

stated point in “The Greatest Weight,” whereby the reader is asked
whether there has ever been a moment in which she longed for the
return of the whole—in both the cherished partiality and its rupture,
the good and the bad? The understatements imply the depth of the psy-
chosocial fixation on partiality, which implies a schizoid position. The
world fixated into Good and Evil is a split world of alternating partial-
ity—from this suffered, idealized experience of the object to that suf-
fered, idealized experience of the object—in which the “wholeness” of
the object, inclusive of its negativity, cannot be borne. Has one, asks
Nietzsche, ever had a trace of the strength to bear the loss of one’s ide-
alized perspectives, and thereby strength work-through that loss as a
necessary part of the perspective itself? Such strength would imply bear-
ing the impurity of one’s values, in which one’s good is similar to, or
entangled with, the most repulsive—the hero and the terrorist, the moral
and the heathen, the pure and impure, the prude and the prostitute. In
Genealogy, Nietzsche links the slaves’ value system, grounded on the
opposition between Good and Evil, with an allergy to the other. The
shared, fixated system of values reflects a shared identity based on the
spiritual condemnation of the other or the strong—herd values serve as
SIGNS OF CONVALESCENCE: RECURRENCE AND INTEGRATING GOOD AND EVIL 149
a defense mechanism. Following from the analyses above, however, this

also implies non-conformity with dominant culture—which enables rec-
ognition and love—insofar as that culture is grounded on shared forms
of partiality. Moving “beyond Good and Evil,” like the embrace of the
demon’s proposition of the necessary integration of all moments, are
expressions for the suffered, social ordeal of a convalescent, working-
through its need for ressentiment.
For Nietzsche, what matters in regard to a judgment is neither its
truth nor falsity, but its expression of a socially reproduced need to con-
form:
The question is how far the judgment promotes and preserves life, how
well it preserves, and perhaps even cultivates, the type. And we are funda-
mentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments…are the most indis-
pensable to us, and that without accepting the fictions of logic, without
measuring reality against the wholly invented world of the unconditioned
and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through
numbers, people could not live—that a renunciation of false judgments
would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. To acknowledge untruth
as a condition of life: this clearly means resisting the usual value feelings
in a dangerous manner; and a philosophy that risks such a thing would by
that gesture alone place itself beyond good and evil.5
The subject is not independent, outside of history, but imagines this

independence as a defense against history. Nonetheless, this falsifying
defensiveness is to some extent constitutive of the dominant form of sub-
jectivity and the status quo. Subjectivity is simultaneously falsifying and
necessary, and Nietzsche’s reference here to the “self-identical” parallels
Adorno’s concern with identity. Nietzsche does not advocate the trans-
gression of the subject, or of morality, but rather a negative dialectic of
subjectivity, which avows the primacy of the non-identical within suf-
fered history. To move beyond Good and Evil would be to undergo the
ordeal of detaching from our needed truths. Such a detachment would
be risky and dangerous, since it inherently challenges the fetishized sys-
tem of norms. This would do something analogous to placing us within
the Kleinian depressive position, in which we are forced to bear our suf-
fered objectivity, and the finitude of fetishized truths—bearing the par-
tiality of our seemingly self-contained purities and their imbrication in
suffered, social history.
Klein and Nietzsche
For Klein, the infant is faced with “reality” from the start, already in its
earliest experiences with the breast which, on the one hand, both satisfies
and frustrates it and, on the other hand, is the target of internal upsurges
of desire and aggression. In Adorno’s terms, the object has primacy in
at least two ways—in the objects the infant needs and in the infant’s
own internal nature, the impulses that drive it in uncontrollable ways.
One might say that the infant’s position is one of weakness in relation
to excessive and overwhelming objectivity. The vulnerable pre-subjective
infant lives in a split world—internally as the upsurge of love and hate
and externally as the valuing of the mother’s body as both a good object
and a bad object—an object that loves and hates. The infant projects its
own persecution by its own impulses onto the mother’s body and intro-
jects that body into itself. In this way, the objectivity or reality of the
mother’s body both satisfies and frustrates the infant’s drives and fanta-
sies insofar as it simply does not conform to them and does not always
satisfy them. This implies the simple fact of the primacy of the objectivity
of the mother’s body which transcends infantile impulses.
In “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive
States,” Klein examines the difference between the paranoid introjection
of the young infant and the melancholic introjection of the older infant.
She writes:
The development of the infant is governed by the mechanisms of introjec-

tion and projection. From the beginning the ego introjects objects ‘good’
and ‘bad’, for both of which its mother’s breast is the prototype—for good
objects when the child obtains it and for bad when it fails him. But it is
because the baby projects its own aggression on to these objects that it
feels them to be ‘bad’ and not only in that they frustrate its desires: the
child conceives of them as actually dangerous—persecutors…These ima-
gos, which are a phantastically distorted picture of the real objects upon
which they are based, are installed by it not only in the outside world but,
by the process of incorporation, also within the ego…6
This is the basis for psychotic or paranoid anxiety in infants. The infant
experiences internal and external nature as persecutors, to which he
or she is vulnerable. Outside of our control, the external object frus-
trates our desires, and we are overwhelmed by the upsurge of internal
nature, which only later enters into consciousness, confounding efforts
KLEIN AND NIETZSCHE 151
to control and guide it. The infant is not able to integrate this objectiv-
ity into a whole ego, or whole external object, but rather defends itself
through paranoiac, psychotic, schizophrenic mechanisms.
In normal development, there is a transition:
As the ego becomes more fully organized, the internalized imagos will
approximate more closely to reality and the ego will identify itself more
fully with ‘good’ objects. The dread of persecution, which was at first felt
on the ego’s account, now relates to the good object as well and from now
on preservation of the good object is regarded as synonymous with the
survival of the ego…Hand in hand with this development goes a change of
the highest importance, namely, from a partial object-relation to the rela-
tion to a complete object…Not until an object is loved as a whole can its
loss be felt as a whole.7
This is a precarious transition in which the need to preserve the good

object defends itself against the threat of uncontrollable, overwhelming,
rupturing internal and external objectivity, which to some extent cor-
responds with Freud’s depiction of the ego (Ich) as mediating between
internal objectivity (id and superego) and external objectivity (exter-
nal nature and others). According to Klein, the paranoid response to
that unpredictability is moderated by the identification with the good
object and the mission to preserve that object. So, “when a well-marked
cleavage between good and bad objects has been attained, the subject
attempts to restore the former, making good in the restoration every
detail of his sadistic attacks.”8 This incidentally implies an environmental
element insofar as the good object is an external object and identifying
with this aspect of external objectivity provides stability, thus fortifying
the ego and minimizing effects of persecution. However, the ordeal of
overcoming the paranoid–schizoid position by internalizing the good
object is precarious because that position serves as a primitive defense
against objectivity and allows a certain rest and protection. In the identi-
fication with the good object, “the ego finds itself forced to a fuller rec-
ognition of psychic reality, and this exposes it to fierce conflicts.”9 The
experience of the whole object—an object that transcends partiality, both
good and bad—is an ordeal.
For Klein, there is a mutual reflexivity between external objects and
the ego; the preservation of the good object (e.g., attachment to car-
egiver) mirrors the stability of the ego which is symptomatic of the intro-
jected relationship with that object. If things go well, external stability
and internal stability mutually reinforce one another in expanding the

ability to negotiate the overwhelming. The persistence of the good
object can aid in the negotiation of internal conflict, and the strength in
the internalization of a strong object into the ego can aid in the nego-
tiation of external conflict. If one thinks of the self as this negotiation,
Klein’s theory addresses the genealogy of the self from suffered relational
histories; relations with others condition the formation of a self out of its
paranoid–schizoid chaos.
The transition to the depressive position, and hence to the infant’s
grappling with the loss of its loved object, is “the transition from partial
to total incorporation of the object” in which the subject has a “sense of
failure (during weaning and in the periods which precede and follow it)
to secure his good, internalized object,” which stems from a failure “to
overcome his paranoid dread of internalized persecutors.”10 On Klein’s
account, the internalization of the whole object is a condition of possi-
bility of subjectivity, but only in so far as it is imbricated with a com-
plexity of difficulties—anxiety situations arising from identifying with a
wholeness that transcends one’s fantasy and trying to maintain that iden-
tification. Of course, to internalize the whole object is not equivalent
to knowing what the object is in itself; rather, it is an achieved mode of
relating to the object, in which one is able to negotiate the fact that the
satisfying aspects of that relatedness are entangled with the unpleasant
more or less traumatic aspects. For Klein, this internalization is the foun-
dation of subjectivity, but it depends on how that founding goes devel-
opmentally within that precariously dynamic, anxiety-ridden interchange
with others, conditioning how that subject will deal with its objects into
adulthood.
One might read this along with the Husserlian emphasis on perspec-
tive and constitution of wholeness as a condition of possibility of sub-
jectivity; the horizon of temporal and spatial, motile experience points
toward an ineradicable transcendence, toward a wholeness that can never
be experienced.11 In Klein’s paradigm, however, the caregiver plays a
central role in regulating that motility for the infant who must learn to
negotiate and bear its exposure to objects and the horizons which con-
stitute its encounters with them. Moreover, caregivers and other loved
objects are infused with an excess of interest—an excess from which
subjectivity is borne, insofar as their embodiedness provides satisfac-
tion and suffering. In this context, the object is not constituted merely
from an “accumulation of predicates” by a transcendental ego, through
the moving, perspectival exploration of shadow sides; rather, the sub-

ject becomes what it is from its suffered relations with special objects.
Such special objects hold, warm, comfort, feed, and sooth, but also in so
doing, in their objectivity, are also experienced from a perspective that is
inevitably exceeded and ruptured. The object I need is also in my way,
painful, disappointing, changing, and disruptive.
For Klein, the distinguishing of good from bad is essential, help-
ing to sort experience. This might be seen as a version of the nobles’
active basis of the distinction between good and bad in Nietzsche’s
Genealogy, which in Klein’s terms would be tied to an ability to nego-
tiate the wholeness of the object. The path to wholeness goes through
the goodness of the object and guides the developing sense of norma-
tivity, in increasing subtlety in distinguishing what to preserve, pursue,
repair, and what to avoid. The normativity underlying the “goodness”
of objects might be said to be derived from both the pleasurable or sat-
isfying encounter with the object and the stability and protection from
disruptive effects of “bad” objects. Again, though the experience of this
primitive wholeness is a condition for subjectivity—of a normative rela-
tionship with the world, of the distinction between subject and object,
and of object relations beyond infantile dependence—the way in which it
unfolds guides the development of a singular personality that is more or
less pathological. The Kleinian version of the slaves’ reactive distinction
between Good and Evil—founded on the unbearable character of the lat-
ter, to which the former is reaction—would be a regressive schizoid ide-
alization. In some cases, the “good” object takes the form of idealization
of perfection that defends against the anxiety of disintegration by posing
a corresponding idealization of “bad.” Inevitable failures to live up to
that perfection may also result in a bad conscience.12
Section 125 of the Gay Science, which addresses the so-called death of
God can be read in this way, in so far as “God” is seen as the founda-
tion of idealized, schizoid values that are fetishized.13 The death of God
might be read as the loss of the shared, culturally reproduced paranoid–
schizoid position, the fetishization of which provided a certain stability
and libidinal payoff to maintaining the bipolarity. The loss of this posi-
tion would signal the entering of a transitional space of exposure to the
not-me, i.e., a sort of depressive position in which we would bear the
whole without splitting into idealized partial values, Good and Evil. That
said, despite the loss of this particular shared fetishization of this split,
schizoid world, its form lingers in the regressive reproduction of myriad
variations which are socially appropriated—in, for example, nationalism,

racism, and sexism—just as in Klein, the depressive position is difficult to
hold and typically leads to types of regression.
On the one hand, Klein distinguishes the two positions: “ … charac-
teristically the depressive is filled with sorrow and anxiety for the object,
which he would strive to unite again into a whole while to the paranoiac
the disintegrated object is mainly a multitude of persecutors, since each
piece is growing again into a persecutor … ”.14 However, on the other
hand, she insists that the two positions are tied together: “I must again
make clear that in my view the depressive state is based on the paranoid
state and genetically derived from it. I consider the depressive state as
being the result of a mixture of paranoid anxiety and of those anxiety-
contents, distressed feelings and defenses which are connected with the
impending loss of the whole love object … ”.15 In the best scenario,
there is a shift from a flowing schizoid partiality, to a depressive ambiv-
alence about the same object, to an increasingly independent, more
nuanced motility which enables preservation and refinding of the good
object; that stable introjection and projection of goodness imply an abil-
ity to integrate the inevitable “badness” of concrete experience. One can
then bear the anxiety of threats of disintegration and loss coming from
within and without. This implies an ability to move, adapt to, respond
to, foresee, and negotiate internal persecutions (which may be pro-
jected), as well as to foresee and negotiate external frustrations (which
may be internalized). This ability implies a greater sense of the objectivity
of oneself and others as ambivalent things that exceed, undergird, and
rupture my subjective ideation, desires, and values:
It seems that at this stage of development the unification of external and

internal, loved and hated, real and imaginary objects is carried out in such
a way that each step in the unification leads again to a renewed splitting of
the imagos. But as the adaptation to the external world increases, this split-
ting is carried out on planes which gradually become increasingly nearer
and nearer to reality. This goes on until love for the real and the internal-
ized objects and trust in them are well established. Then ambivalence…
will in normal development again diminish in varying degrees…Along with
the increase in love for one’s good and real objects goes a greater trust in
one’s capacity to love and a lessening of the paranoid anxiety of the bad
objects—changes which lead to a decrease of sadism and again to better
ways of mastering aggression and working it off.16
If things do not go well and the relationship with the caregiver is unsta-
ble, pathological defenses against the anxiety of disintegration and
the threat of loss, are developed: paranoia, mania, overidealization of the
internal good object, projection of all persecution onto external world,
and overidealization of the goodness of external objects to compensate
for anxiety arising internally and externally.
There are environmental conditions for an ongoing negative dialec-
tic in which relationships with loved and hated objects can be borne in
a progressive, less persecutory sense. But, Klein’s analysis invites further
questions about the conditions of possibility of overcoming the schizoid
position, since the caregiver himself or herself has a suffered relational
history that conditions the caregiving. What socio-historical conditions
are most conducive for facilitative caregiving—perhaps less traumatic,
more mournful, or convalescent forms of society? Moreover, it may be
the case that dominant forms of sociality, and consequently of subjec-
tivity, reproduce the potential for traumatic exposure and hence repro-
duce the loss of self that longs for an idealized, partial “good” object as
the occasion for the fixation of ego and culture. Threatened with ego
loss, the split, paranoid–schizoid world seems to find a social analog in
Nietzsche’s analysis of ascetic culture—a basic form of regressive group
stability.
It might be said that the position implied by Nietzsche’s bipolarity of
Good vs. Evil is at its worst indicative of regression to paranoid–schizoid
position, of floating partiality where the hold on a good stable object—or
environment—is so tenuous that threats and persecutors are seen every-
where. The world is then experienced as a chaotic struggle between ide-
alized good and idealized bad objects. However, instead of a full-blown
regression to paranoid schizophrenia, this may more often take the form
of manic defenses as symptoms of more or less normal inabilities to
work-through the depressive position. For Hannah Segal, manic defenses
have an important and positive part to play in development. The resolu-

tion of depression by reparation is a slow process and it takes a long time
for the ego to acquire sufficient strength to feel confidence in its reparative
capacities. Often the pain can only be overcome by manic defences which
protect the ego from utter despair; when the pain and threat lessen, manic
defences can gradually give way to reparation. When, however, manic
defences are excessively strong, vicious circles are set in motion and points
of fixation are formed which interfere with future development.17
These defenses are expressions of dependence on the whole object that

cannot be borne, and Kleinian reparation is only something that can
be attained later, by negotiating these defenses, by working-through
the wholeness. The good, stable caregiving environment creates condi-
tions—albeit imperfect—within which wholeness may be borne, bit by
bit, slowly without defense, without the need for libidinally charged,
id-infused bipolarity. Klein’s insistence on both the importance of the
environment and the recalcitrance of impulse—despite the best of envi-
ronments—is paralleled in Nietzsche’s simultaneous emphasis on culture
and on the internal weakness and ressentiment that inevitably lead to
regression in certain ways, at certain times. Nietzsche’s modest question
in section 341 of Gay Science as to whether or not one had ever had the
feeling that they would praise the demon, and embrace the return of the
whole, indicates the extent of the challenge of convalescing from socially
reproduced fixation.
Affecting this shift from manic defenses to the ability to repair lies
a slow acknowledgement of dependence and the threat of loss. Segal
writes: “The infant discovers his dependence on his mother, his sense of
valuing her and, together with this dependence, he discovers his ambiv-
alence and experiences intense feelings of fear of loss, mourning, pin-
ing and guilt in his relation to his object, external and internal…manic
defences will be directed against any feelings of dependence, which will
be obviated, denied or reversed.”18 One might note that this might be
seen as similar to the critique of subjectivism in Nietzsche, which aims
to show that “free will” and other subjectivistic beliefs and values are
symptoms of suffered, social histories. For Nietzsche, Western cultural
history—through the influence of dominant forms of ressentiment, in
Christianity and the market—reproduces inabilities to bear whole objects
(and the depressive symptoms which arise from experience of wholes).
His “solution” might be read through genealogy and convalescence as
the suffered ordeal of bearing an unbearable history of dependence.
The pre-subjective infant negotiates its chaotic, overwhelming expe-
rience through projection (attributing our internal life to other people
around us) and introjection (by which the outer world, its impact, situ-
ations, objects are taken into the self). For Klein, “ … introjection and
projection go on throughout life and become modified in the course of
maturation; but they never lose their importance in the individual’s rela-
tion to the world around him. Even in the adult, therefore, the judg-
ment of reality is never quite free from the influence of his internal
world.”19 A Kleinian epistemology would not have recourse to an a

priori mind endowed with free will and cognitive access to truth; rather
within a suffered relational scene, there is a mutual interpenetration of
subject and object through introjection and projection. Only within
a stable holding environment can a subject emerge which can bear the
overwhelming character of objectivity and thereby distinguish what
is fantasy from what is real. In the best conditions, there is something
like a dialectic of introjection and projection, where the immovability of
the object is brought to bear on the subject’s projective magic such that
both are maintained in a manner similar to the Winnicottian transitional
object, which is both created and found. If there is too much projection,
there is no ability to experience dependence on the object; if there is too
much introjection, there is no ability to experience independence from
the object, no ability to creatively intervene in the world.
To introject the good mother is to establish a tendency to feel and
understand oneself as capable of being satisfied, of having anxiety
calmed, of feeling secure, as if the world is friendly and negotiable. With
the good now inside, there is a stability in the infant’s world, as she or he
is able to wait and negotiate the “bad” aspects of objectivity which medi-
ate access to the desired object. According to Klein,
If the mother is taken into the child’s inner world as a good and depend-
able object, an element of strength is added to the ego. For I assume that
the ego develops largely round this good object, and the identification
with the good characteristics of the mother becomes the basis for further
helpful identifications…makes it easier for the child to identify also with a
good father and later on with other friendly figures…All this contributes to
a stable personality and makes it possible to extend sympathy and friendly
feelings to other people.20
However, even in the best of circumstances, there are elements of

destructive feelings of the young infant that are increased by anxiety and
lack of good caregiving. For Klein, greed (a desire that can never be sat-
isfied) and envy (a desire to spoil satisfaction for others, including the
caregiver) are pathologies of desire that reflect a lack of the internali-
zation of a stable good object, characteristic of an inability to hold the
depressive position. In place of integration of desire and reality, there is
a fixation of desire unable to negotiate the objectivity of objects, which
exceeds and ruptures desire.
The Kleinian depressive position implies the suffered negotiation of

the excessive character of the object to which I am attached, where guilt
and reparation become possible. There is then a sort of dialectic of being
in debt, making reparation, being owed, showing gratitude, and seeking
and granting forgiveness of debts and indebtedness. Making and seeking
reparation imply a basic acknowledgement of relationality, and of being
vulnerable to the other. Good caregiving implies acknowledging and
inculcating an acknowledgement of dependence as well as the need for
gratitude and forgiveness. Nietzsche’s description in the second essay of
the Genealogy of the divinization of the unpayable character of debts and
the irresolvability of indebtedness would represent pathologies of this
norm, albeit pathologies that characterize the dominant form of Western
culture. One might contrast Klein’s notions of gratitude and reparation
with indebtedness, sin and divine redemption. Klein’s approach avows
the negativity of the object and the exceeding of the principle of equiva-
lence without a bad conscience.
A Nietzschean conception of cultural convalescence as the work-
ing-through of ressentiment might have some similarities with Kleinian
gratitude, which is simultaneously an expression of enjoyment and an
acknowledgment of dependence on the one who provided it. On our
account, it expresses a Kleinian beyond good and evil, as a way of negotiat-
ing suffered, relational scenes. She writes: “In normal development, with
growing integration of the ego, splitting processes diminish, and the
increased capacity to understand external reality, and to some extent to
bring together the infant’s contradictory impulses, leads also to a greater
synthesis of the good and bad aspects of the object. This means that peo-
ple can be loved in spite of their faults and that the world is not seen
only in terms of black and white.”21 Ressentiment might be understood
as the absence of gratitude, as lack of working through the wholeness of
objects in the depressive position where one would see one’s finite objec-
tive self as the precarious source of love and hate, and the finite objec-
tive other. Ressentiment is the socially reproduced denial of the whole,
the fixation of partiality into Good and Evil, ranging from guilt-ridden
mania to paranoid–schizoid partiality. Moreover, it is a world borne in
loss—the dominant cultural response to which takes the form of consola-
tion in the form of fairy tales, lies, and “pure” free-willing subjectivity,
rather than reparation, caregiving, and gratitude. This is a world trapped
within a reproductive circle of infants deprived of good objects and
envious, greedy adults creating the social conditions which thwart the
flourishing of good objects. Dominant forms of modernity would then

reproduce bad environments that thwart the work of integrating that
unintegrable, more or less overwhelming, more or less excessive strange-
ness into an experience of wholeness. There is then a parallel between
Nietzsche’s description of the convalescent and the healthy playful infant,
whose environment would facilitate the bearing of the anxiety of motile
negotiation of wholeness without trauma.
Klein and Nietzsche have similar paradoxical conceptions of suf-
fered wholeness and suffered integration. On the one hand, they sug-
gest the transgressing of partiality, and on the other hand, the whole is
not attained or attainable, but rather borne as the condition of possibil-
ity of subjectivity’s partiality. Nietzsche writes: “A person is necessary, a
person is a piece of fate, a person belongs to the whole, a person only
is in the context of the whole,—there is nothing that can judge, meas-
ure, compare, or condemn our being, because that would mean judg-
ing, measuring, comparing, and condemning the whole…But there is
nothing outside the whole! … ”22 This connects in an interesting way
with Melanie Klein’s notion of “partial” and “whole” objects, which
is also not metaphysical. She is distinguishing between two positions:
“paranoid–schizoid,” in which idealized partial, perspectives are discon-
nected in a bipolar allergy to whole objects, and “depressive.” (in which
the negativity of whole object is borne as loss—I love this object, even
though it ruptures and exceeds that love and ideation). There is no
“organic” or conceptual whole, but a bearing of a “whole” as a loss;
the whole is not “being” or “idea,” but rather suffered, negotiated. It
is not a knowable whole, nor an unknowable whole as a thing-in-itself,
but rather a whole in the sense that the object to which I am affectively
attached traumatizes, provokes defenses. The depressive position is
simply the condition of possibility of personhood; it is where paranoid
schizophrenia becomes neurosis, i.e., human subjectivity. It allows a con-
ception of the subject as constitutively positioned between partiality and
wholeness, at a suffered crossroads between a fixed, comforting (often
socially shared) partiality and a transcending objectivity which exceeds,
ruptures, and conditions that partiality. Klein’s appeal to reparation as
the work of negotiating that crossroads can be conceived as a negative
dialectic which emphasizes the integration of partiality into a broader
movement of suffered, socially mediated moments. In other words,
interpreting reparation in this way would emphasize abilities to relate to
objects, to move through the world.
Nietzsche’s often-quoted remark that “One must still have chaos in

oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star” could be read as val-
orizing a self that is able to hold itself—a socio-historically conditioned
ability—within that precarious co-implication of good and bad, despite
the unending threat of disruption by negativity within and without.23
Consistent with Klein’s emphasis on the internalization of a good object,
an ability to contend with chaos must exist in order for the birth of crea-
tivity to take place. Nietzsche is not valorizing schizophrenia, but rather
a type of stability amidst the often chaotic transition of moments, in the
form of a convalescent ability to bear loss and rupture. Such an ability,
reproduced within suffered social scenes, would preserve and strengthen
the legacy of good objects, which moderates suffering, and produces cre-
ativity necessary to transform the world. From this Kleinian perspective,
idealism is not an expression of a lack of chaos, but rather the expression
of an inability to bear the chaos within us, an inability to hold oneself
within its precarious, inevitably ruptured relationship with the object.
Idealism would then take the form of a sophisticated paranoid–schizoid
position, which defends itself (i.e., absolves itself of its guilt, its need to
make reparations) by erecting an idealized “good object” which would
magically neutralize the bad. “Idealism,” as the expression of ressenti-
ment, would be the dissociation of the idealized good object from its
socio-historical conditions of possibility, incapable of gratitude and una-
ble to make reparations.
As is typical of psychoanalysis, in Klein, the valorized position or
result of human development is rather modest—the ability to endure the
ordeal of the depressive position and sustain an engagement in the end-
less task of making reparations. There is no orgasmic transgressive revo-
lution or brave hero within us to be awakened, rise up, and resolve all
problems, but rather a slow, often boring, ordeal of repairing our rela-
tionships and world. Klein’s emphasis on the importance of stable car-
egiving might be seen as coinciding with Nietzschean convalescence as
implying implicit imperative to create a world more suitably aligned with
our vulnerability to each other.
Winnicott and Nietzsche
Some of the most obvious points of comparison between Winnicott

and Nietzsche are their respective emphases on the themes of play, soli-
tude, compliance, and the critique of dominant animistic conceptions
WINNICOTT AND NIETZSCHE 161
of subjectivity as somehow magically residing outside of embodied his-

tory. Play is valorized throughout Nietzsche’s work. He writes: “Human
maturity: this means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play
when we were children.”24 This idea is also reflected in the well-known
parable of “On the Three Metamorphoses” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
where Zarathustra proclaims: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a
new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a
sacred yes-saying.”25 Winnicott emphasizes the infant’s play as the risky
mediation between subjective omnipotence and objective relationality.26
Given a sufficiently facilitating environment, the playing infant comes
to slowly negotiate objects—as both that which responds to its subjec-
tive fantasy and creativity and that which resists and exceeds that subjec-
tivity. Adequate facilitation by the environment enables an increasingly
subtle integration of subject and object, with an increasingly confident
and secure playing infant. Lack of such facilitation exposes the infant to
the traumatic character of the not me—the objectivity within and with-
out, which disrupts and overwhelms subjectivity. “Environment” for
Winnicott is understood as relationality; it is not merely an external con-
text, but rather the relations that mediate suffered negotiation of internal
upsurges and external vicissitudes.
Both thinkers emphasize the blending of subject and object in their
respective valorizations of creativity and play. Nietzsche writes: “True
philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything
that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them. Their
‘knowing’ is a creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth
is—will to power”.27 This expresses the way in which Nietzsche revises
the traditionally conceived epistemological relationship between subject
and object in which the subject is conceived in its ability or inability to
conceive of the object in itself. As discussed in Chap. 4, for Nietzsche,
knowing is a creating, because of the suffered relationship between sub-
jectivity and objectivity.28 Knowing always contains an element of magi-
cal subjectivity expressive of its ability or inability to bear and negotiate
suffered social history; to “know” this history in a Nietzschean sense, to
carry out genealogical critique, is to disrupt dominant culture and con-
tribute to the creation of a new future.
For Winnicott, the infant’s transitional object, with which it plays in a
sufficiently facilitating environment, is both created and found; it reflects
this fusion of subject and object, of spontaneity and reality that consti-
tutes play as transitional. This transitional experience, as the infant’s
negotiation with the not-me, is foundational of the form that subjectivity

subsequently takes. Winnicott writes:
Relating to objects is by no means a matter simply of the maturational pro-

cess. As always, maturation (in psychology) requires and depends on the
quality of the facilitating environment… there gradually develops in the
individual a change in the nature of the object. The object being at first
a subjective phenomenon becomes an object objectively perceived. The pro-
cess takes time, and months or even years must pass before privations and
deprivations can be accommodated by the individual without distortion of
essential processes that are basic to object-relating.29
In Klein’s paradigm, there is always that which exceeds the good object,
both within—as the upsurge of desire and aggression—and without—
in the objective finitude of the object, which inevitably turns “bad.”
Kleinian reparation implies the ability to negotiate this convoluted world,
based on a lack of equivalencies, with a good conscience. Winnicott’s
notion of play and the transitional space is similar—in playing, I am not a
separate “thing” among other “things,” within an independent value and
meaning that can be compared to that of other “things.” As with Klein,
my subjectivity is within the object (through projection) and it is within
me (introjection). Play happens within a protected environment which
allows the crossing of borders of self and other, of idea and reality—with-
out a bad conscience. Moreover, in that transitional space protected by
the caregiver, it is precisely the failures of the infant’s magic produced
by the imperfections of the caregiver’s response—i.e., the negativity of
experience that which ruptures, undergirds, and exceeds the infant’s sub-
jectivity—that drives the transition to having a shared world. This nega-
tivity—located in Klein’s analysis within the ordeal of internalizing the
whole object, characteristic of the depressive position—slowly teaches
the infant to bear the limit of its omnipotence, to incorporate that limit
into itself, as an initial but hopefully expanding the sense of objectivity.
Winnicott writes: “The change of the object from ‘subjective” to ‘objec-
tively perceived’ is jogged along less effectually by satisfactions than by
dissatisfactions … the frustrating aspect of object behavior has value in
educating the infant in respect of the existence of a not-me world … the
infant can hate the object, that is to say, can retain the idea of the object
as potentially satisfying while recognizing its failure to behave satisfacto-
rily.”30 It is the difference between subject and object—and the primacy
of the latter—which ruptures, situates, and conditions the former, driv-

ing the possibility of development, of progression from infantile narcis-
sism.
On Winnicott’s model, the transitional space of play is exciting
because the not-me does not completely conform to a subjective idea or
will, but resists it; play is the negotiation of this resistant and inevitably
frustrating objectivity, and as such, it is the condition of possibility of
instinctual satisfaction. If objectivity traumatizes and there is no learned
ability to play, the possibility of using objects for enjoyment in any sus-
tained sense is obliterated. This implies the imperative of the creation of
a good enough environment, which contains within it the promise of
pleasure. The relational primacy implies that there must be a relation for
there to be satisfaction. Moreover, relating minimally implies spatialized
and temporalized situatedness. For Winnicott, much of aggression and
libido are used up through motility involved with negotiating objectivity.
In this way, relationality mediates libidinal cathexes. Good enough car-
egiving facilitates abilities to engage in mobile relatedness; the environ-
mental facilitation of play enables this discharge to be integrated within a
motile exploration of objectivity.
Winnicott writes:
Each infant must be able to pour as much as possible of primitive motil-

ity into the id experiences. Here no doubt comes the truth of the need
the infant has for the frustrations of reality…In the pattern of id experi-
ence that belongs to any one infant there is x percent of primitive motility
included in the id experience. There is then (100 – x) per cent left over for
use in other ways—and here indeed is a reason for the vast difference in
the experience of various individuals in regard to their aggressiveness…31
This suggests that future aggressiveness stems from the extent to which
motility was integrated in the attaining of desired objects, so that id satis-
factions are situated within a world within one must move and relate. In
less than optimal situations, the environment is not explored, but rather
experienced as impinging. This results in a defensive preservation of a
true self in withdrawal that merely reacts to, rather than integrates with,
the environment.
In bad environments, there are traumatic ruptures in the unfolding
of integrative motility, in which love and aggression would be mediated
by objectivity. Without sufficient covering, the infant cannot bear its
exposure to other objects, its movement through perspectives and partial

positions, through the wholeness of its self (desires, moods, emotions,
fatigue, pain, pleasure, etc.) and the wholeness of the other, in ways
that reproduce an ongoing transitional integration of spontaneity with
objects, in the mobile interface with objects. In the wrong environment,
a traumatic defense against objects may arise, resulting in pathologies
of spontaneity that is unintegrated with objects, resulting in regressive,
socially facilitated release of spontaneity, or in regressive paranoid–schiz-
oid symptoms, susceptible to socially shared projections and introjections
of persecution, hate, and envy.
If the relational environment fails, motility is only possible as a reac-
tion or as masochistically internalized. In Nietzsche’s terms, one might
say that the social straightjacket inhibits motile integration of love
and hate with objectivity, resulting in instincts turned inward, or cru-
elty directed at oneself, as discussed in the second essay of Genealogy.
Loss of nomadic prehistory is also the loss of the motility that burns
up aggression. Within the walls and symbolic limits of society, uninte-
grated aggression can be socially appropriated. In contrast, convalescence
implies a more subtle integration of subjectivity with the objectivity that
conditions and ruptures it, in which motility becomes more subtly inte-
grated with id satisfactions, love with hate.
Winnicott defines the pre-subjectivity of the infant as “self in process
of becoming evolved.”32 This pre-subject is not some sort of “thing,”
“identity,” or an authentic source of being, acting, or choosing, but
rather self-in-process, negotiating its own affective, bodily upsurges as
well as external objects; the self is not a Cartesian or transcendental sub-
ject, but rather that which negotiates the upsurge of internal and external
objectivity. The implied multiplicity in Winnicott’s view has some simi-
larity with some of Nietzsche’s comments on the soul. In Beyond Good
and Evil, for example, he writes: “ … the path lies open for new versions
and sophistications of the soul hypothesis—and concepts like the ‘mortal
soul’ and the ‘soul as subject-multiplicity’ and the ‘soul as a society con-
structed out of drives and affects’ want henceforth to have civil rights in
the realm of science.”33
Winnicott’s valorization of solitude has interesting parallels to that of
Nietzsche. As discussed in Chap. 3, Nietzsche bemoans the dominant
cultural interpretation of suffering, which deprives it of its singular mean-
ing. The Winnicottian analyst, like the good enough caregiver, facilitates
the becoming of the person, by its imperfect adaptation to the relational
environment. The analyst and caregiver play their roles by allowing

a space of freedom and failure, in which that constitutional exposure
might come to bear itself and negotiate that to which it is exposed. For
Winnicott, “… there is a danger if the analyst interprets instead of wait-
ing for the patient to creatively discover … It is only here, at the place
when the analyst has not changed over from a subjective object to one
that is objectively perceived, that psycho-analysis is dangerous … If we
wait we become objectively perceived in the patient’s own time … ”.34
If one jumps in and interprets, and tells them the truth, this violates the
patient’s true self-in-process, which may then provoke a defense. The
good analyst thereby strives to become a stable relational object for the
patient, in the patient’s own time, albeit imperfectly, to facilitate non-
traumatic suffering of objectivity.
Winnicott also describes this type of relatedness that nurtures the sin-
gularity of the subject—typical of good caregiving and therapy—in terms
of the need to communicate. For Winnicott, “At the centre of each per-
son is an incommunicado element, and this is sacred and most worthy of
preservation,” but there are traumatic experiences that are a “threat to
the isolated core, the threat of its being found, altered, communicated
with. The defence consists in a further hiding of the secret self… ”.35
Bad caregiving does not preserve the incommunicado core, but rather
threatens it, provoking a defense by which that core is sealed off from its
exposure to objects. One can compare what Winnicott sees as a relational
process with Nietzsche’s socio-historical process in so far as social condi-
tions that do not preserve this sacred space—in the concrete imposition
of the slaves’ morality and the herd—provoke as a defense a buried, less
integrated, more idealized assertion of a magical self in the form of ascet-
icism, “free will,” or other symptom expressive of an inability to negoti-
ate objectivity within and without.
For Winnicott, the healthy individual is split: She enjoys communicat-
ing, but only insofar as she is “an isolate, permanently non-communicat-
ing, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.”36 This reflects the sacred
character of the incommunicado element, a foreign core worthy of being
sheltered and facilitated. Good caregiving nurtures this core and its abil-
ity to sustain itself in the midst of exposure. This is strikingly similar to
Nietzsche’s valorization of solitude, singularity, and the need for masks.
Nietzsche writes: “Every choice human being strives instinctively for a
citadel and secrecy where he is rescued from the crowds, the many, the
vast majority: where, as the exception, he can forget the human norm.
The only exception is when he is driven straight towards this norm by

an even stronger instinct, in search of knowledge in the great and excep-
tional sense.”37 One might say that for Nietzsche, this secret core is not
only the condition of possibility of creative activity and psychological
health, but also the condition of possibility of liberation from the herd.
As suffered defense against exposure, we are all susceptible to the allure
of fetishized forms of the ascetic ideal and are therefore all more or less a
part of the herd. Winnicott insists on both the necessity of the preserva-
tion of the secret core and the formation of a malleable protective shell,
which complies with a common culture and that which can be commu-
nicated.
Winnicott distinguishes between the true self (which cannot be commu-
nicated) and the false self (which adapts itself to others expectations and
culture): “The false self is built up on a basis of compliance … there are all
degrees of this state of affairs so that commonly the true self is protected
but has some life and the false self is the social attitude. At the extreme of
abnormality, the false self can easily get itself mistaken for real, so that the
real self is under threat of annihilation; suicide can then be a reassertion
of the true self.”38 To be clear, his position is not simply that there is an
authentic self which stands opposed to an oppressive compliance. Rather,
compliance and the false self—like ressentiment as the effect of slaves’
morality, for Nietzsche—are constitutive of socialized persons.
For Winnicott, the false self “ … has the function of making and
maintaining contact with the environment and at the same time of pro-
tecting and hiding the true self.”39 This false self is both constitutive, but
also more or less integrated, and more or less fixated, i.e., it tends toward
what Nietzsche describes as the inculcation with the habits and tenden-
cies of the herd. Winnicott writes that
The ‘individual’ then develops as an extension of the shell rather than of

the core…what there is left of a core is hidden away…The individual then
exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal
with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true
self hidden. The false self may be conveniently society-syntonic, but the
lack of true self gives an instability which becomes more evident the more
society is deceived into thinking that the false self is the true self.40
Nietzsche might be read as developing a critique of the culture of com-

pliance, which mass produces false selves in bad environments.41 The
socio-historical dominance of compliance is reproduced by concrete

social conditions, but also on the symbolic level where “pity,” “sin,”
“freewill,” and other moral concepts guide interpretations of rela-
tionality. What Nietzsche calls the “loss of self” that is reproduced and
exploited by ascetic culture might be read as the obliteration of the
capacity to be alone. Nietzsche’s critique of obligatory, simplified, partial
symbols that facilitate and reproduce compliance and simplify the exces-
sive complexity of things and the self reflects a conception of traumatic
culture that obliterates the ability to be alone.
Notably, Winnicott places compliance within the heart of “self” (ego),
I. Sociality precedes this self, so that what Nietzsche calls “the herd”
is not merely the result of laziness, or of adopting “traditional moral-
ity.” It is the symptom of a suffered, social need, active at the origins
of selfhood, conditioned by the relational environment and the extent
to which that environment as failed. In the best scenario, the good car-
egiver responds imperfectly, and within that persistent imperfection,
the infant learns the suffered, negotiated distinction between subject
and object and acquires a sense of self by integrating its spontaneity
with the objective world. Here, the False Self is a “whole organization
of the polite and mannered social attitude, a ‘not wearing the heart on
the sleeve’, as might be said,” which has enabled a gaining of a “place
in society which can never be attained or maintained by the True Self
alone.”42 The compliant aspect of the self is the ability to compromise
and adapt to social demands while preserving the sacred incommunicado
element of the truth self.
In contrast, in the worst scenario, “Where the mother cannot adapt
well enough, the infant gets seduced into a compliance, and a compliant
False Self reacts to environmental demands and the infant seems to accept
them…the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of
introjections even attains a show of being real… ”.43 Its one main function
is “to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmen-
tal demands.”44 The pathologically rigidified false self acts like a defense
mechanism which protects the sacred space of the true self from exploita-
tion; it buries the true self and projects a maniacal compliant pride in its
place. Consistent with the logic of slaves’ values and the positing of free
will, the pathological variation of the Winnicottian false self preserves the
magic and spontaneity of the true self, albeit as a willing of nothingness,
dissociated from a more or less traumatic environment. Compliance is “a
defence against that which is unthinkable, the exploitation of the True

Self, which would result in its annihilation.”45
For Winnicott, the True Self is not merely a pre-given center of con-
sciousness, but rather comes from embodied impulses, that is, from the
embodied pre-subject, rather than from some sort of magical cause from
within subjectivity. The subject develops through the environmentally
conditioned embodied relationality, and only subsequently depending on
how things go do capacities of reasoning and practical decision-making
emerge. He writes:
The infant then comes to be able to react to a stimulus without trauma

because the stimulus has a counterpart in the individual’s inner, psychic
reality. The infant then accounts for all stimuli as projections, but this is a
stage that is not necessarily achieved, or that is only partially achieved, or
it may be reached and lost…the infant is now able to retain the sense of
omnipotence even when reacting to environmental factors…All this pre-
cedes by years the infant’s capacity to allow in intellectual reasoning for the
operation of pure chance…46
If things go well, the stability of the environment is internalized, which

is similar to Klein’s notion that internalized good objects constitute a self
capable of enduring and negotiating the bad as partial, surpassable, tem-
porary, but as inevitable part of the whole object. Nietzsche’s frequent
exhortations that one should affirm fate might be read through this pre-
carious process of accounting “for all stimuli as projections.” Here, one
does not stoically accept necessity as an immovable, deterministic natural
system, but rather integrates spontaneity dialectically with that objectivity
which undergirds, conditions, and ruptures it. The opposition between
Dionysus as playful negative dialectic and the Crucified as fixated ressenti-
ment as a defense mechanism is not based on a choice or belief made by a
presupposed metaphysical core of action, but rather a contrast between
forms of suffered sociality. The concept of the preexisting metaphysical
core is itself a defensive fantasy, produced by a spontaneity that has been
cut off from motile play with objects. It evokes a primacy of a site or
scene within which reflection ultimately arises, within which subjects and
objects are initially indistinguishably fused. Only slowly, bit by bit, labo-
riously, are they incompletely distinguished, if the environment is good
enough to facilitate a gradual negotiation of frustration.
The essential psychoanalytic notion of resistance to analysis can be

explained through this lens. Such resistance would take the form of
a defensive hyperallergy to being exposed in within relationality. This
resistance then emerges as a defensive compliance, from a traumatized
being in-process. Similarly, one might extrapolate an explanation of
the allergy to Nietzsche (or at least a need to domesticate his theory as
based in naturalism or romantic self-assertion) from this. To engage in
Nietzschean genealogy is to bear and work-through our abject histories,
in which our exposed, relational ancestors were traumatized by the loss
of nomadic freedom and the violent, deforming imposition of the social
straightjacket and the division of labor. As these histories are reproduced
both concretely and symbolically, one might conceive of the tendency to
caricature, neutralize, or dismiss Nietzsche—on a model one might inci-
dentally also apply to common views of Marx and Freud, for example—
as an expression of the inability to bear the exposure that it evokes.
Both Winnicott and Nietzsche valorize a self-in-process without a
bad conscience, which can bear itself as relational and exposed. Sociality
may be more or less flexible in demanding compliance, in allowing for
non-communication within a play-space of mediated communication.
Convalescence might be read as the working-through of the environ-
mentally mediated obliteration of the Winnicottian “true self,” that
self-in-process contending within more or less traumatic, suffered socio-
historical scenes. It is the interruption of the socio-historical reproduc-
tion of hypercompliance through a facilitated solitude—not presence to
oneself as an identity, or physical isolation, but the ability to be alone,
negotiating internal and external objectivity, the play of introjection
and projection, and the demands of compliance. In this sense, solitude
is untimely within a dominant culture of ressentiment which works to
thwart it. For Winnicott, the interaction with the caregiver is not strictly
speaking social, but it does form the core of the subsequent socio-cul-
tural experience. First, the caregiver’s abilities are themselves conditioned
by suffered, social histories, and he or she exists within a particular milieu
which conditions—that caregiving. Second, Winnicott’s insistence on the
environmental mediation of the self can be expanded beyond the car-
egiver—whose activity can be seen as paradigmatic for the role of social
organization in general, as that which imperfectly mediates our exposure.
Winnicott stresses the capacity to be alone, not actually factual situ-
ations in which one is separated from others. He says that this stems
from the experience “of being alone, as an infant and small child, in the
presence of mother … the basis of the capacity to be alone is a para-

dox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present.”47
The seeming paradox in the concept of “being alone” implies relational-
ity within which one can be alone; it implies sociality from which one
is separated. This separation is never absolute; the relationship persists
through the separation. One might read this as an experience of the non-
identical—not reacting, not goal-directed subjectivity, not compliance,
but sheltered space of play not reducible to the logic of identity or equiv-
alence. Winnicott writes:
When alone [in the presence of someone]…the infant is able to become

unintegrated, to flounder, to be in a state in which there is no orientation,
to be able to exist for a time without being either a reactor to an external
impingement or an active person with a direction of interest or movement.
The stage is set for an id experience…the sensation or impulse will feel real
and be truly a personal experience.48
This is like convalescence—suffering of material embodiment on its own

time, which enables a process of working oneself out of obligatory social
compliance and fetishism. Being alone, in Winnicott’s sense, might be
described as the mournful bearing of ambivalence, the allowing of one’s
internal and external nature to happen, without a bad conscience, i.e.,
without pressures to comply. For Winnicott, this facilitates ego capacity
as that which negotiates this imbrication, by facilitating working-through
of attachment to structures of affectively charged social compliance. On
the cultural level, the fetishization of commodities, the culture of ressen-
timent, and the consolations of the ascetic priest are cultural modes of
thwarting this capacity. So, the issue would not merely placing a primacy
on the need for good mothering, but rather on the role of culture in
conditioning and playing the role of mothering for adults, inclusive of
caregivers.49 One could extrapolate from the description of good car-
egiving to conceiving of good social conditions as providing a sheltered
space within which to facilitate abilities to negotiate the non-identical.
For Winnicott, “ego-relatedness” does not refer to a Cartesian ego
with metaphysically foundational understanding and freewill. “Ego”
rather refers to the Freudian term, somewhat problematically used as
a translation for the German term “Ich,” or I. Here, the I, or “ego,”
is that which negotiates through temporal and spatialized activity, the
upsurge in internal and external objectivity (i.e., the negotiation of
the id, superego, and external reality, including social relations). For
Winnicott, the ego is that which, following Klein, would ideally come
to an ability to negotiate whole objects—objects that change, move, die,
cause us pain, affect us, etc. Whereas id relationships are those fueled by
bodily, affective attachments to partial objects, it is only in the context of
ego relations that the latter can be negotiated, integrated.
Winnicott implies that the use of metaphor—upon which so many
Nietzsche commentators place emphasis—is itself a legacy of the infant’s
environmentally conditioned play. As in Nietzsche, for Winnicott,
“health here is closely bound up with the capacity of the individual to
live in an area that is intermediate between the dream and reality, that
which is called cultural life.”50 Likewise, where there is a rigid split
between the True and False Self, Winnicott finds a notably hindered
ability to use symbols, i.e., to bear that ambivalent transitional status of
objects.51 The characteristic of the transitional object as both found and
created is also indicative of the ability of adults to use symbolic language.
He suggests that when the mother’s responses are good enough,
the infant begins to believe in external reality which appears and behaves
as by magic (because of the mother’s relatively successful adaptation to the
infant’s gestures and needs)…On this basis the infant can gradually abro-
gate omnipotence…can gradually come to recognize the illusory element,
the fact of playing and imagining. Here is the basis for the symbol which at
first is both the infant’s spontaneity or hallucination, and also the external
object created and ultimately cathected.52
This is then suggestive of the claim made earlier about the primacy of the
suffered environment which conditions the use of language. Nietzsche
does in fact use metaphorical language to subvert metaphysical concepts,
but more fundamentally argues that the ability or inability to think meta-
phorically is conditioned by suffered, social histories.
Winnicott identifies two sorts of groups. First, there are groups com-
prised of those who are relatively well integrated and who thereby do not
require a shared defense as a parental stand-in. Having been provided a
stable facilitating environment as infants, they did not develop rigidified
false selves as protection from objectivity, but were able to integrate—to a
certain degree—their subjective spontaneity with that objectivity: “ … the
organization that each individual brings in terms of personal integration
tends to maintain the group identity from within … the group benefits
from the personal experience of individuals, each of whom has been seen
through the integration moment, and has been covered until able to pro-
vide self-cover.”53 This type of group is a collection of selves-in-process
who each provide self-cover, which is only possible because each had been
provided proper “cover” within a good facilitating environment, which
enabled them to work-through their exposure, vulnerability. The second
sort of group is “… a collection of relatively unintegrated persons can be
given covering … Here the group work does not come from the individu-
als but from the covering … ”.54 In other words, this a group that coheres
because of shared compliance. This implies that where the facilitating envi-
ronment has failed, integration (as the becoming able to cover oneself and
navigate objectivity) has failed, and the fixated false self is a symptom of
this failure. It identifies with bad social conditions in order to protect the
true self, which buried far away from the threatening otherness. In the
group, members have a shared identity, and shared defense, in the compli-
ance itself, which amounts to a shared, fixated partiality.
For Winnicott, there is no mind or spiritual core of will and under-
standing. Rather, at the beginning, “Here is a body, and the psyche and
the soma are not to be distinguished except according to the direction
from which one is looking … I suppose the word psyche here means the
imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings and functions, that is, of
physical aliveness.”55 If the environment (i.e., caregiver) is good enough,
the infant becomes able to allow for her deficiencies by mental activity.
This applies to meeting not only instinctual impulses by also all the most
primitive types of ego need, even including the need for negative care or
an alive neglect…The mind, then, has as one of its roots a variable func-
tioning of the psyche-soma, one concerned with the threat to continuity of
being that follows any failure of (active) environmental adaptation…mind-
development is very much influenced by factors not specifically personal to
the individual, including chance events.56
Winnicott’s language here is remarkable—“negative care,” “alive

neglect,” “environmental failure”—emphasizing the interruptions of
spontaneity, conceptuality, and control. This implies a primacy on that
suffered negativity of experience of which the “mind,” and intellectual
activity, is symptomatic. If things go right, these interruptions are inte-
grated within the facilitating environment in the right measure, as the
core of suffered, socially mediated exposure. For Winnicott, this leads

to an integrated psyche-soma more able to negotiate its relational objec-
tivity. He says, for example, that IQ is not a quality of a mind, but a
function of the infant’s ability to release its good enough caregiver from
having to provide that good enough environment.57
The view of mind as a split from the body, of which Nietzsche offers
a genealogy, is in Winnicott’s terms a pathological defense due to poor
environment—the expression of a false self that expresses a defensive fan-
tasy of a rift with the soma with which it is imbricated. Commonly in bad
relational environments, he writes:
we find mental functioning becoming a thing in itself, practically replacing

the good mother and making her unnecessary. Clinically, this can go along
with dependence on the actual mother and a false personal growth on a
compliance basis…the psyche of the individual gets ‘seduced’ away into
this mind from the intimate relationship which the psyche originally had
with the soma. The result is a mind-psyche, which is pathological.58
Nietzsche and Winnicott both invert the tradition which sought to

derive the mediated from the unmediated and insist that the concept
of the unmediated arises from bad mediation. According to Winnicott,
“The question has to be asked why the head should be the place inside
which the mind tends to become localized by the individual, and I do
not know the answer. I feel that an important point is the individu-
al’s need to localize the mind because it is an enemy, that is to say, for
control of it. A schizoid patient tells me that the head is the place to
put the mind because, as the head cannot be seen by oneself, it does not
obviously exist as part of oneself.”59 In the third essay of Genealogy,
Nietzsche traces the origins of such a mind, in the fairy tale of “pure
subjectivity,” back to the ascetic ideal, which is a culturally reproduced
compulsion to be elsewhere and otherwise. In the case of the “mind,”
the ideal attempts to localize the cause of spontaneity in a non-location,
as a defense against objects, i.e., against motile negotiation of more or
less threatening, more or less traumatic, objectivity. All of this might be
seen as an attempt to localize and thereby control spontaneity, which
cannot be controlled, as it is undergirded, conditioned, and ruptured by
the object. So, it is itself defensive, dissociated, symptomatic “control,”
localized, outside of any conditions—unmediated control, which, on the
one hand, is a sort of symptomatic fantasy, but, on the other hand, is real
insofar as it is socio-historically produced and coincides with dominant

forms of social life—first the unmeasured exposure to the overwhelm-
ing and second, the pervasive, varied forms of fetishized (socially shared)
consolation which encourage regressive dissociation.
Integrating the Non-Integrable

On our reading, the theories of Klein, Winnicott and Nietzsche are
similar in their emphases on the role of the relational environment—
more or less facilitating or pathological—in conditioning the ordeal
from which subjectivity arises. All valorize a type of environmentally
mediated work of integrating the non-integrable. Each can be said to
characterize a transitional aspect of subjectivity facilitated by the suf-
fered social histories from which that subjectivity was born. In Klein,
there is a transition from the paranoid–schizoid position to the depres-
sive position which is enabled by the persistence of good object experi-
ences. For Winnicott, there is a transition from a lack of integration
to—albeit inherently incomplete—integration of primitive subjective
omnipotence with “not-me” objects, including one’s own body, within
a sufficiently facilitating environment. Winnicott distinguishes the true
self from a false self of compliance, which rigidifies within an insuffi-
ciently facilitative environment.
As has been discussed, these themes can contribute to a relational
reading of Nietzsche, despite the fact that he is not developing a psy-
chology of infancy. First, Nietzsche also emphasizes the role of a
failed environment in his discussions of the origins of slave morality,
the imposition of the social straightjacket, the social dimensions of res-
sentiment, and the consolations of the ascetic priest. Second, there is a
Nietzschean version of this compliant false self and a buried true self
dissociated from the failed environment. Because of bad conditions, a
defensive, exaggerated form of “subjective omnipotence” is asserted
in a magical direction, expressive of the ascetic ideal. In Winnicott’s
terms, one might say that the member of the herd, like an uninte-
grated infant, never had the cover from a good caregiver to learn to
deal with unknown, excessive objectivity in a playful, singular way.
Consequently, there is mere compliance with the bad caregivers in
the environment and “true” selves take on a dissociated, spontaneous,
unintegrated form—in animistic conceptions of subjectivity, expressive
INTEGRATING THE NON-INTEGRABLE 175
of the ascetic ideal. Winnicottian “environmental failure” might be

read with Nietzschean “cultural failure,” in which, in more or less trau-
matic social conditions—not conducive for this transition from part to
whole, within sheltered play between me and not-me—compliance with
inherited, obligatory values and concepts enable survival by means of
conformity to shared partiality. The need to comply arises from envi-
ronmental failure (lack of facilitating, convalescent environment), and
compliance, from Nietzsche’s perspective, is socio-historically pro-
duced asceticism; but with asceticism comes consolation, regression,
and mania that are likewise socially reproduced, resulting in a socially
appropriated and reproduced bipolarity.
For Winnicott, “the infant is most of the time unintegrated, and never
fully integrated.”60 Consistent with Adorno’s conception of negative dia-
lectics, negotiation of suffered, social scenes includes both integration
and the impossibility of integration—integration which preserves that
which cannot be integrated. Negative dialectics is not the disintegration
of a whole or unity, nor is it merely the deconstruction of fantasies of
integration that would demonstrate some sort of impossibility of inte-
gration. Rather, it implies relational history in which partial objects are
integrated with each other, albeit imperfectly, reflecting the constitu-
tive character of the gap between subject and object. This imperfection
is what motivates ongoing, renewed agency and presents the impera-
tive that we tend to the environment, as that which facilitates and/or
traumatizes. The subject’s striving to integrate is an expression of infan-
tile magic or omnipotent agentic negotiation of the not-me, which for
Winnicott must be maintained, while also being thwarted. This is seen in
the model of play as a paradigm of health—active subjective magic com-
bined with its inevitable failure, which nonetheless motivates renewed
magical agency.
The quality of the magic depends on the depth of failure that can be
borne. If one cannot “love fate,” to use Nietzsche’s phrase (amor fati),
one’s subjectivity dissociates from the not-me into a fixated defense
against imperfection, which is suffered as traumatic. On the other hand,
if things have gone well, within a good enough socio-historical facilitat-
ing environment—for Nietzsche, both material and symbolic—the sub-
ject comes to a creative ability to negotiate the imperfect objectivity of
that environment. Creative subjectivity is activated to the extent that it
works through the objectivity which conditions it.
Notes
1. As discussed in previous chapters, object relations psychoanalysis empha-
sizes relations over drive theory. Klein, for example, writes: “it seems
essential to regard the libido-disposition not merely as such, but also to
consider it in connection with the subject’s earliest relations to his inter-
nalized and external objects… ”. See Klein, “A Contribution to the
Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 151.
2. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Edited by Bernard Williams, Translated by
Josefine Nauckhoff, 194.
3. Ibid., 195.
4. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 5–6.
5. Ibid., 7.
6. Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,”
145.
7. Ibid., 147.
8. Ibid., 149.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 150.
11. See, for example, Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Active and
Passive Synthesis.
12. Klein writes: “The persecutions and demands of bad internalized objects;
the attacks of such objects upon one another … the urgent necessity
to fulfill the very strict demands of the ‘good objects’ and to protect
and placate them within the ego … the constant uncertainty as to the
‘goodness’ of a good object, which causes it so readily to become trans-
formed into a bad one—all of these factors combine to produce in the
ego a sense of being a prey to contradictory and impossible claims from
within, a condition which is felt as a bad conscience… ”. See Klein, “A
Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 151.
13. See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 119.
14. Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,”
155.
15. Ibid., 159.
16. Ibid., 173.
17. Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, 82.
18. Ibid., 83.
19. Klein, “Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy,” 294.
20. Ibid., 294–295.
21. Ibid., 297.
22. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other
Writings, 182.
NOTES 177
23. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Translated by Adrian Del Caro, 9.

24. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 62.
25. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 16–17.
26. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1–25.
28. One might compare this relational interpretation to that of Michel Haar,
for whom this ambiguity in the status of the object expresses a revelation
of chaos. According to Haar, Nietzsche has a new sense of “appearance”
that includes “both truth and lie, both reality and fiction. It signifies at
once ‘appearance’ in the sense of paralogism (a sin against logic) and in
the sense of veracious vision of being as Chaos. Gathering within itself
all contraries, it deliberately explodes the logic of identity … Everything
is a mask. Any mask once uncovered uncovers another mask. ‘Becoming’
is simply the indefinite play of interpretations, an indefinite shifting of
masks.” See Haar, “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” 15. On our
reading, the ambiguity of the object is the expression of the subject’s suf-
fered relationality with objectivity, i.e., an expression of Nietzsche’s nega-
tive dialectic.
29. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a
Study of Certain Opposites,” 179–180.
30. Ibid., 181.
31. Winnicott, “Aggression in Relation to Emotional to Development,” 211.
Study of Certain Opposites,” 185.
Study of Certain Opposites,” 189.
35. Ibid., 187.
36. Ibid.
38. Winnicott, “Classification: Is There a Psycho-analytic Contribution to
Psychiatric Classification,” 133.
39. Winnicott, “Group Influences and the Maladjusted Child: The School
Aspect,” 153.
40. “Aggression in Relation to Emotional to Development,” 212.
41. Nietzsche writes: “… it is reasonable to suppose that the average per-
son has an innate need to obey as a type of formal conscience that com-
mands … ‘Thou Shalt”… This need tries to satisfy itself and give its
form a content, so, like a crude appetite, it indiscriminately grabs hold
and accepts whatever gets screamed into its ear by some commander or
another—a parent, teacher, the law, class prejudice, public opinion …
The oddly limited character of human development—its hesitancy and
lengthiness, its frequent regressions and reversals—is due to the fact that
the herd instinct of obedience is inherited the best and at the cost of the
art of commanding … the herd man of today’s Europe gives himself the
appearance of being the only permissible type of man … ” See Beyond
Good and Evil, 86–87.
42. Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” 143.
43. Ibid., 146.
44. Ibid., 147.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 149.
47. Winnicott, “The Capacity to Be Alone,” 30.
48. Ibid., 34.
49. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur.
50. Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,”150.
51. Ibid., 150.
52. Ibid., 146.
53. Winnicott, “Group Influences and the Maladjusted Child: The School
Aspect,” 149–150.
54. Ibid., 150.
55. Winnicott, “Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-Soma,” 244.
56. Ibid., 245–246.
57. Ibid., 246.
58. Ibid., 246–247.
59. Ibid., 247.
60. Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” 145.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. 1966. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp

Verlag.
Adorno, Theodor. 1982. Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist
Propaganda. In The Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike
Gephardt. London: Continuum.
Adorno, Theodor. 2001. Negative Dialectics, trans. Dennis Redmond. http://
members.efn.org/~dredmond/ndintro.PDF. Accessed 30 March 2010.
Adorno, Theodor. 2003. The Meaning of Working-Through the Past. In Can
One Live After Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Critical Models. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Allison, David B. 1985. The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bauer, Karin. 1999. Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology,
Readings of Wagner. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2000. The subject of true feeling: Pain, privacy and politics. In
Transformations: Thinking through feminism, ed. S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury,
M. McNeil, and B. Skeggs, 33–47. London: Routledge.
Bird-Pollan, Stefan. 2015. Hegel, Freud and Fanon. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Blondel, Eric. 1991. Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. Seán Hand.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 179

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6
180 Bibliography
Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Coe, Cynthia D., and Matthew C. Altman. The Paradoxes of a Convalescent
History: Nietzsche’s Genealogy as a Form of Working-through. In New
Nietzsche Studies, vol. 6 (Fall 2005) and 7 (Spring 2006), 116–228.
Conway, Daniel. 2008. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Reader’s Guide.
London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Différance. In Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark
Taylor, 396–420. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1976. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York: Harper
Perennial.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1996. Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault. In
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 4 (1): 1–16.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, 142.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. In Transforming the
Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Ormiston and Shrift,
59–67. SUNY Press. Originally published in 1964 Nietzsche, Cahiérs du
Royaumont, 183–192. Paris: Les Editions du Minuit.
Freud, Sigmund. 2001. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. ed. James Strachey. London: Vintage.
Hatab, Lawrence. 2008. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An
Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and
Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1996. The Struggle for Recognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis:
Lectures on Transcendental Logic. trans. Anthony Steinbock. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Jackson, Jeffrey M. 2010. Persecution and Social Histories: Towards an Adornian
Critique of Levinas. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 36 (6), July.
Jackson, Jeffrey M. 2014. Philosophy and Working-through the Past: A
Psychoanalytic Approach to Social Pathologies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Janaway, Christopher. 2012. Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bibliography 181
Klein, Melanie. 1935. A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive

States. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 16: 145–174.
Klein, Melanie. 1959. Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy. Human
Relations, 12: 291–303.
Kofman, Sarah. 1998. Camera Obscura of Ideology, trans. Will Straw. New York:
Cornell.
Loewald, Hans W. 1980. Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1963. Werke. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage
Books.
Marx, Karl. 2004. The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur. New York:
International Publishers.
Mills, Jon. 2010. Origins: On the Genesis of Psychic Reality. Montreal: McGill-
Queens University Press.
Mitchell, Stephen A. 1988. Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: an Integration.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will To Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans.
Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morality and Ecce Homo, trans.
Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Vintage.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-
Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999a. Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15
Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999b. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed.
Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine
Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann
and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005a. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols,
and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith
Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2005b. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes.
Oxford: Oxford University.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian del Caro and
Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
182 Bibliography
Owen, David. 2007. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. Stocksfield: Acumen.

Pippen, Robert B. 1999. Nietzsche and the Melancholy of Modernity.Social
Research 66 (2): 495–520.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans.
Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ridley, Aaron. 2005. Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt? The Second Essay
of Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 29.
Risse, Mathias. 2001. The Second Treatise in On the Genealogy of Morality:
Nietzsche on the Origin of Bad Conscience. European Journal of Philosophy
9 (1):55–81.
Segal, Hanna. 1973. Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. London: Karnac
Books.
Siemens, Herman. 2001. Nietzsche’s agon with ressentiment: towards a thera-
peutic reading of critical transvaluation. Continental Philosophy Review 34:
83.
Winnicott, D.W. 1965a. Classification: Is There a Psycho-analytic Contribution
to Psychiatric Classification. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating
Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. New York:
International Universities Press.
Winnicott, D.W. 1965b. Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a
Study of Certain Opposites. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating
Environment. New York: International Universities Press.
Winnicott, D.W. 1965c. Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In
The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York:
International Universities Press.
Winnicott, D.W. 1965d. Group Influences and the Maladjusted Child: The
School Aspect. In The Family and Individual Development. London:
Tavistock.
Winnicott, D.W. 1965e. The Capacity to Be Alone. In The Maturational
Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International
Universities Press.
Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.
Winnicott, D.W. 1975. Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development. In
Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic Books.
Index
A Convalescence, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 14, 19,

Adorno, 1, 3, 29, 31, 63, 93, 107– 21, 25, 33, 43–46, 48–53, 55–64,
115, 117–124, 126, 136–138, 69, 73, 81, 94, 101, 115, 117,
149, 150, 175 119, 121, 124, 126, 128, 130,
Aggression, 24, 86, 135, 136, 150, 132, 137, 144, 147, 156, 158,
154, 162–164 160, 164, 169, 170
Ascetic ideal, 1, 5, 7, 10, 19, 23, 34,
36, 38, 63, 70, 87, 95, 107, 119,
121, 123, 127–129, 131–138, D
145, 166, 173–175 Deconstruction, 18, 34, 35, 53, 57,
64, 175
Depressive position, 4, 10, 149,
B 152–155, 157–160, 162, 174
Bad conscience, 10, 15, 23, 24, 70, Division of labor, 22, 23, 26, 27, 30, 33,
71, 73, 81, 83–86, 88, 90, 92, 35, 37, 38, 75, 113, 114, 130, 169
93, 98, 99, 101, 109, 113, 128,
132, 135, 136, 143, 153, 158,
162, 169, 170 F
Facilitating environment, 3, 4, 21,
109, 145, 161, 171, 172, 174,
C 175
Caregiver, 3, 23, 151, 152, 155, Freud, 3, 4, 22–24, 29–31, 33–38,
157, 162, 164, 167, 169, 170, 43–49, 69–71, 83, 92, 109, 122,
172–174 151, 169
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 183

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59299-6
184 Index
G M
Genealogy, 2, 3, 5–10, 14, 17, 18, Marx, 3, 4, 22, 23, 25–38, 109, 113,
21, 24, 25, 33, 36, 62, 63, 69, 114, 122, 126, 130,
70, 72–74, 76, 81, 83, 86–90, 169
95, 96, 101, 107, 114–116, 119, Metaphor, 4, 13, 17–21, 32–35, 38,
121, 124–128, 130, 131, 143, 171
146–148, 152, 153, 156, 158,
164, 169, 173
N
Negative, 1, 3, 5, 16, 59, 60, 83, 89,
H 96, 98, 107–112, 114, 117, 119,
History, 1–3, 6, 7, 9, 11–16, 19–33, 121, 122, 124, 129, 131, 147,
35, 36, 38, 44, 46, 48, 49, 60, 149, 155, 159, 168, 172, 175
63, 69–74, 76–78, 80, 81, 83, Non-identity, 9, 18, 46, 54, 114, 115,
84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 118, 124, 126
96, 99–101, 109, 110, 112–115,
117, 118, 121–123, 125–129,
131–134, 136, 137, 149, 155, O
156, 161, 164, 175 Object, 2–4, 6, 8–10, 15, 16, 18, 19,
23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35,
38, 44–47, 50, 51, 54–56, 59,
I 62–64, 78, 80, 81, 86, 88, 90,
Identity, 1, 7, 10, 20, 21, 30, 54, 55, 95, 107–128, 130, 132, 133,
62, 63, 73, 89, 93, 108, 111– 136, 137, 143–165, 167–175
114, 117, 118, 121–126, 129, Object relations, 4, 23, 80, 123, 138,
144, 148, 149, 164, 169–172 143, 145, 153
K P
Klein, 3, 4, 10, 23, 69, 93, 122, 138, Play, 11, 18, 21, 45, 52, 55, 58, 60,
143–146, 150–160, 162, 168, 72, 124, 131, 152, 155, 159–
171, 174 163, 165, 168–171, 174, 175
L R
Language, 6, 11–14, 18–20, 26, 30, Ressentiment, 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 15, 19,
43, 44, 46, 55, 60–63, 70, 73, 33, 43, 44, 48–53, 56, 58–64,
74, 77, 88, 92, 111, 113, 116, 70, 73, 77, 79, 82, 86, 88, 92,
126, 138, 146, 171, 172 93, 98–101, 113, 125, 128, 130,
Index 185
131, 133–135, 145, 149, 156, Subjectivism, 2, 4, 44, 156

158, 160, 166, 168–170, 174 Suffering, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15,
16, 18, 21, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31,
35, 43–45, 47, 48, 50, 56–64,
S 72, 76–78, 80, 81, 83, 84,
Sadomasochism, 96, 113 86, 92–94, 96–101, 108, 110,
Schizoid position, 3, 4, 120, 146, 148, 113, 122–124, 129, 130, 132,
151, 153, 155, 160, 174 134–138, 144–146, 148, 152,
Shame, 94, 99, 130 160, 164, 165, 170
Slaves’ morality, 15, 98, 123, 145,
165, 166
Sociality, 1, 4, 6–8, 10, 12, 14, 15, T
18, 19, 22, 38, 43, 44, 46–48, Transitional phenomena, 4
61–64, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77,
83, 85, 87, 90–93, 96–101, 109,
111, 115, 117, 121, 123–127, W
131, 132, 143, 145, 155, Winnicott, 3, 4, 18, 23, 69, 86,
167–170 122, 138, 143, 145, 146, 157,
Solitude, 14, 46, 49, 51, 57, 94, 160, 160–175
164, 165, 169

Jeffrey M. Jackson: Genealogy and Convalescence

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jeffrey M. Jackson: Genealogy and Convalescence

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Jeffrey M. Jackson: Genealogy and Convalescence

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

G e n e a l o g y a n d Co nva l esc e n ce

ISBN 978-1-137-60152-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59299-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937463

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover Illustration: © johnwoodcock

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book is dedicated to Alli Antar—my best friend. Her uncompromis-

live—I want to thank my older brother James for everything, including

2 Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality 43

3 Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy

4 Nietzsche’s Negative Dialectic: Ascetic Ideal

5 Working-Through Perspectives in Nietzsche and Object

This book draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory to interrogate the

© The Author(s) 2017 1

expressions of suffered, social histories and Nietzsche’s concepts of gene-

both found and constructed, which depicts the socio-historical conditions of

reasoning—rather its navigation takes the form of convalescence, a suf-

On this reading, Nietzsche would primarily be concerned with the suf-

Errors, Lies, and the Suffered Social Histories

from which any truth or error—i.e., any subjectivity—would arise. Lies,

to see differently, and to want to see differently to that degree, is no small

not simply a tracing of subjectivity back to the body, will to power, or

forged. Nietzsche provides a model of reflection which comes to itself

product of convalescence from ressentiment, the product of the genea-

This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in humankind, where deception,

Here, Nietzsche seems to emphasize natural history, as if nature pro-

falsity that grounds cognition presupposes the existence of language—

Truth in this sense serves the function of ameliorating suffering, of facili-

Nietzsche suggests that the dominant function of language is not to

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropo-

This “feeling of truth” that is so fundamental to the contemporary

To what end does consciousness exist at all when it is basically superfluous?

Language as herd-signal, as a gesture, enables commonality as a basis

the prehistoric, nomadic predator is not possible because human subjec-

be correct. In effect, the truth that genealogical reflection interrogates

Familiarizing something unfamiliar is comforting, reassuring, satisfying,

These errors are symptomatic of dependence on others through which

Nietzsche’s thought to that of the play of signifiers, means forgetting

it is always situated within relational, suffered historical scenes that are

On the one hand, if metaphor is “the mode in which a living passage

Against Blondel’s view, one might invoke relational psychoanalysis’s criti-

If genealogy is the discourse that consists in relating cultural phenomena

Scenes of Subjectivity: Nietzsche with Marx and Freud

Various thinkers have linked Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche together as

affection toward others, with upsurges of desire and aggression emerging

As will be discussed in Chap. 3, in the second essay of Genealogy, the

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions

Here, Marx seems to echo Nietzsche’s critique of magical forms of sub-

Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage

On our reading, the reference to camera obscura here is not merely an

apparent and not bearable, insofar as dissolving that dependence would

Where speculation ends—in real life—there real, positive science begins:

Even when asserting this positivist critique of social history, Marx

It is only within such scenes of cooperation or division of labor that

Ricoeur, Kofman, Foucault

“counterattack” false consciousness.41 Ricoeur portrays the subject’s

Kofman identifies the central critical element in Marx as the transgression

of subjectivity, are symptomatic of more or less traumatic social histories.

Errors, Lies, and the Suffered Social Histories

Scenes of Subjectivity: Nietzsche with Marx and Freud

As will be discussed in Chap. 3, in the second essay of Genealogy, the

15. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

34. See Marx, Capital, 125–177, 871–895.

Convalescence, Mourning, and Sociality

Abstraction in Popular Readings of Nietzsche:

Relationality, Trauma, and the Genealogy

Relationality in the First Essay of on the Genealogy

Relationality in the Second Essay of on the Genealogy

Naturalism and Animistic Subjectivity: Common